In the Dark (Count Mistakes)
by endgirl
Summary: Piper grapples with who she is and what she has left, if anything, in the weeks following her breakdown. Alex/Piper, set after season one. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

It's just like before, only worse. Because this time when you let go of Alex—only to realize you've made another epic fucking mistake—there is no going back.

The only thing that kept your selfish, miserable feet moving forward in Paris was the knowledge that _if you felt like it_, you could turn around and run right back to her. You could have Alex back in the minutes it took to hop a cab from Charles de Gaulle to the flat where she was packing up your lives. Or you could book a ticket to the funeral and meet her there, all airy apologies and half-baked excuses. If you felt like it, you could change your mind.

Just like the fickle, self-involved horse's ass that you are.

This time, though, your stupidity is irreversible. It started out the same way, because you're just as much of an impulsive idiot now as you were eight years ago: leave Alex, die inside, come to your senses. But by the time you got to step three and realized what a colossal fuckup you'd made—which was literally _as_ the words _I pick him_ were falling out of your mouth—the damage was done. You knew it as soon as she got up from the table, even before you talked to Larry and he ended it and you called Alex a crazy, manipulative liar.

It's really you you were talking about.

But you hoped anyway, because it's _Alex fucking Vause_ and she is inevitable to you and there had to be a way, some last-gasp way for you to erase the past several hours. To go back in time and listen to your heart instead of the traitorous voice in your mind that convinced you you needed stability more than love.

When you walked into Alex's block and saw her sitting there with Nicky, you knew there wasn't a way. She had looked you up and down six ways from Sunday over the years, but never like that. Never with cold, hateful eyes that saw _through_ your soul instead of into it. And that look, still, even though you were shaking and crying and clearly scared out of your goddamn mind. Alex has always been fiercely protective of you, whether the offender was a meddling mule or a skeezy guy in a bar or that wasp that lived outside your bungalow in Java until she gallantly slayed it for you. She would never leave you afraid and alone, not ever, not like you did to her.

Not unless she was totally, utterly, absolutely fucking done.

But it's not like it matters. Even if Alex didn't hate you, you would still be sitting in this concrete box in the SHU, unable to tell her that you chose wrong and that all you really want is to freefall to Cambodia with her and her ridiculously hot glasses. You're going to die in here, you're sure of it, whether from the insanity or the semi-voluntary hunger strike you've been staging. A faraway corner of your mind tells you you're being melodramatic, but it just makes you laugh the hollow cackle you've developed over the past eight weeks, because Larry called you a drama queen right before you went psycho on Pennsatucky. And he was right.

Maybe you really are the Piper from his article—just the jackass who traded other people's happiness for a few years of adventure and multiple orgasms. Or maybe you're the Piper from Alex's rage—the jackass who sacrificed other people's happiness for Sundays at the farmer's market and a low-risk-low-return 401k.

Either way, the jackass part is the same.

When Mendez finally hauls you up and tells you it's over, you stumble all the way to the van. It's not that you've grown weak, which you have, or that the feeling of another person's hands on your body makes your knees shake, which it does. It's the fact that you haven't died in SHU after all—a fate you only now realize you were looking forward to. Because now that you're still alive, you have to see her again, see her hurting up close and personal. Or, worse, you have to see her not bothered at all, because she's moved on. You bite your tongue until you taste blood, because even now—even fucking now—you're pulling for a scenario where Alex is hurting and you're not. She's right to be done with you.

Your feet are firmly beneath you by the time you get out of the van, but the world isn't. Sunshine blinds you. The abundance of open space makes your head whip from side to side. You're pretty sure this is what insanity looks like, and you feel grateful no one is watching through the window.

Morello hasn't spoken to you apart from a stilted _Welcome back, Chapman_ when you first got in the van. You wonder if she's under orders from Nicky to express the mutual distaste Team Alex holds for you. You shouldn't be surprised, really. Prison always was like high school, if high school had toothbrush shanks and foot fungus. Still, her snubbing pricks a new hole in your already pin-cushioned heart. You didn't grasp until now how much she and the other inmates had come to mean to you.

Outside the newbies' bunks, where you'll wait to be assigned all over again, she glances over her shoulder before squeezing your elbow and telling you she's glad you're okay.

"Am I?" you say. Your voice breaks a little bit, because you really need to know.

"You'll get there." Morello smiles, and you feel a flicker of hope that maybe you'll still find some kindness among the women who made your first three months in hell bearable. Maybe you'll be able to keep your head down and finish out your time, just like you'd planned to.

Hope is what you lost in the SHU, you realize, along with your sanity and your figure. The spark of it now, however dim, bolsters your spirits enough for you to thank her without crying.

You don't know what happened to your things after the Pennsatucky debacle, so when Morello scurries back to work, you sit down on the mattress that seems vacant and stare at the opposite wall until lunch. You've gotten good at waiting, and it's a much nicer wall than you had in the box.

It's still early when you leave for the dining hall, but you're wary of making an entrance in a packed room. Better you arrive first, while everyone is still on duty, and slip quietly into a seat before you become a spectacle.

As you meander the halls, you marvel over how much has changed, and how much hasn't. Signs decorate the empty rec room for the goodbye party of a prisoner you don't quite remember, but you'd swear the Scrabble board was in that exact position when you were last here.

You turn toward the kitchen, your stomach already clenching in anticipation of actual, honest-to-God food. And then your insides start seizing for another reason, because that's when you see her.

Alex stands in the middle of the hallway, wide-eyed and staring at you through those fucking glasses. Nichols skids to a stop close behind, and they're both breathing heavily, as if they sprinted here, or as if they—no. No. You force the other possible cause of labored breath from your mind, because you just cannot handle it. Not today.

"Vause." Nicky says it like a warning, pulling at Alex's arm. Your gaze snaps to her hand. You can't help yourself. Alex doesn't let just anyone touch her.

But she doesn't let Nicky pull her away, either. You're frozen in place, both of you, and though you are determined not to give her the puppy dog eyes, you're pretty sure your face is betraying every goddamn thought you've had over the past two months. Alex's face—her perfect fucking stupid face—is a jumble of emotions that have been too well-obscured for you to interpret. The pain is unmistakable, and the anger. But the hate...

Is the hate still there?

You ache to run the ten feet into her arms regardless, to sob into her neck about how sorry you are and how you pick her and how you figured out that prison loaf is sort of edible if you swallow little chunks whole, who'd have thought? Five fucking steps—that's all it would take for you to be home.

But you haven't forgotten the rules. You are not to go to her, not ever. Beating up a bible-thumping meth head and doing a stint in the SHU doesn't change anything. And you don't intend to fuck up on your very first day back.

It takes every sliver of your willpower and then some, but you avert your eyes and walk around them—Alex and her new pet.

You're glad she has someone, you tell yourself.

You should be glad.


	2. Chapter 2

Alex doesn't come to lunch, but it's just as well. You aren't sure you could stomach the sight of her and Nichols laughing together over a plate of beef tips and chewy corn on the cob.

And besides, you have your hands full with your well-wishers, who, to your surprise, seem to outnumber those who were hoping you'd been shanked in the yard. The Jesus freaks glare at you on behalf of Pennsatucky, who is nowhere to be seen, and the table of white girls avoids eye contact with you on behalf of Alex. But Poussey gives you a shit-eating grin and a _Fuck, girl, took you long enough_, and Taystee hugs you partway through your green beans. It might be the best hug you've ever had, even if her arms aren't the ones you want and she smells like lavender instead of like Alex.

Sophia tells you to come by later and she'll fix you up for free, which you're guessing means you look like a neglected Afghan hound that's been left outside in the mud. Still, it's a nice gesture.

You've spent weeks fantasizing about Red's cooking, but when the moment of truth arrives you can only force down a few bites before they threaten to start coming back up. You'll buy some pretzels later at the Commissary, you tell Suzanne, when she says that if you were still her wife she'd make you finish your whole tray, because_ that much skinny doesn't look right on anyone, Dandelion, not even you_.

Despite your churning stomach, by the time lunch is over you feel a little bit more like a person, and a little bit less like the schizophrenic pariah you became in the SHU.

You still haven't been reassigned to a job—none of the COs have spoken to you at all, except for when Mendez told you he'd missed your little lesbian jerk shows—so when the other inmates shuffle off to work, you return to your empty temporary bunk.

Only when you get there, it isn't empty anymore.

A box has been placed on your mattress, and inside are all the things you left behind when you went to solitary. Someone must have rescued them for you before they could get packed up by a CO and lost in a bin somewhere. Taystee, maybe. But Taystee would have told you. She would have brought the box to you personally and taken a couple of Snickers for her trouble. Anyone would have. There's only one person who would have done this in secret, and the thought makes you wipe furiously at your cheeks.

You sit down and sift slowly through the box, item by item, and remind yourself that the world—even your world, even here—is made up of more than just heartbreak and loneliness. The world has books you can read, and letters you can write, and friends you can call. It has hairbrushes and candy bars and photographs of babies you'll one day get to meet.

As you look at each of your photos—you and Cal and your parents last summer, Pete and Polly comparing Finn to the Thanksgiving turkey—you regret that you ripped up the ones of you and Larry in your frenzy before the Christmas pageant. You think it would have been therapeutic, now, to look at each one in turn and say a silent goodbye to that possible future. When you were finished, you would seal them up in an envelope and mail them to Polly, and she'd keep them safe for you until one day, a long, long time from now, when you felt like reminiscing about that period of your life when you pretended to be everything your parents wanted.

Pictures of Larry, though, are not what you're really looking for. You flip open a hardback copy of _The Sound and the Fury_, where you had hidden the photo of you and Alex that you'd asked Cal to mail to you a few weeks in. The two of you are sitting on the beach in Bali, before the business got rough, and Alex's arm is wrapped around your bare waist. She looks radiant, and you look like you've been handed the keys to the kingdom, and whenever you study the photo you can feel her phantom fingers on your stomach all over again.

But _The Sound and the Fury_ contains nothing but Faulkner's words. Your other books are empty, too, and you thumb through every page twice to be sure. It isn't mixed into the stack of family photos, either, or in the pile of letters, or in the tupperware of Commissary snacks.

Did Alex find it?

Did she go through your things and pull out the photo? Did smile when she saw it? Did she rip it into a hundred pieces? Your palms begin to sweat. Did she show it to Nicky? Did the two of them laugh about how young and naive you were? When they were finished, did they burn it in the yard?

No, you decide, swallowing hard. You don't think they did. That's the kind of thing you would have done to Alex, not the kind of thing she would have done to you. Still, you wonder where the picture is now.

You go to Sophia later, and her hands on your scalp tick another box in your transition from SHU-rat to moderately functional human being.

"You talk to her yet?" Sophia says, as she sits you up and squeezes a towel at the nape of your neck.

You think about playing dumb, but what's the point? "No."

"You're just delaying the inevitable, you know."

Your head snaps to the side, despite the comb that tugs your hair painfully in the opposite direction. "Why? Did she say something to you?"

"That girl don't have to say anything, honey." Sophia nudges your cheek back toward the mirror. "She's not as subtle as she thinks she is, least not when it comes to you. Been walking around like a zombie, though whether she wants to kiss you or kill you, I couldn't say."

Her words make you wonder whether, if given the choice, you'd rather live out your life with Alex pretending you don't exist, or die tonight by her hand.

You think you'd choose to live, but it's close.

When you're clean and untangled, you sit in Caputo's office and listen to him threaten to throw the book at you. You tune out all but the essentials: Healy is suspended pending review, Doggett woke up after two weeks and is expected to make a full recovery in Psych, minus a few teeth, and the holy roller lawyers have decided not to take your assault to trial. You imagine there must have been security tapes of Healy leaving you, and that Natalie Figueroa is the one behind making the whole thing disappear. You make a mental note to bake her a prison casserole sometime, which brings a huff of cheerless laughter to your lips.

Caputo squints at you like you've lost it, but he dismisses you without comment. You'll start back in electric tomorrow.

The orange inmates who share the stacked bunks give a wide berth when you meet them, after a dinner of half a roll and three limp baby carrots. You wonder what they've heard about the crazy violent lesbo named Chapman. Shame fills your chest, cold and damp, but you're thankful for the silence. You climb into your bunk, though it's still light outside, and doze with your back to the door until count. You think you hear Nicky's voice whispering outside the cell at one point, but it's gone before you're fully conscious, and you didn't hear who she was talking to, anyway. Maybe you'll take up sleeping as a hobby, instead of yoga or jigsaw puzzles.

In the morning, though, things look a little brighter. It's the advice your father used to give when he wanted to tune out your childish problems and get back to his paper. The part that annoyed you most was that he was nearly always right.

You eat a bit of breakfast, despite having to do it while staring at the backs of Alex and Nicky's heads. You've put on some of the concealer Sophia gave you yesterday—_for those dark circles, honey, and maybe you should give some to your girl while you're at it_—which seems to make Sister Ingalls less insistent on force-feeding you her leftovers.

When you call Polly on your way to work, she answers before the end of one ring.

"Piper?" she says. "Piper, is that you?"

You realize this is the first time anyone has said your name in eight weeks. You grin into the phone, even though your throat feels tight and watery. "Know any other inmates at Litchfield Correctional?"

"Just the one asshat who keeps getting herself locked up in solitary. I mean Jesus, Piper, what the hell did you do this time?" Polly's voice is exasperated, but you can hear the worry in it. "Your parents are a wreck, Larry won't tell me anything, I can't even find—"

"I'm not with Larry anymore." It's the first time you've said it out loud, and it doesn't hurt as much to hear as you expected. "Look, there's a line, I just wanted to let you know I'm okay, and I think I can have visitors again. Will you tell my parents for me?"

"Of course. And I'll see you this weekend, you goddamn idiot." The line goes quiet for a minute, and you wonder if she was angry enough to hang up on you. Just as you're about to put the phone in its cradle, she's back. "You're my favorite idiot, Piper."

Your voice breaks, but you smile. "Love you too, Pol."

When you round the corner from the phone bank, you almost run smack into Alex, who is leaning against the wall and waiting her turn. You jump away from her, as if you've collided with the arm's-length forcefield that keeps Alex Vause protected from the world, and its dial is set to ricochet. She reaches out to steady you, because you're still about as sturdy as a twig in a hurricane. But she pulls her hand back at the last second, and you find your footing on your own.

You hear Black Cindy on the phone, still, with her grandmother, and you realize this means Alex heard you. Her face doesn't betray what she thinks of your confession about Larry, and you bite your tongue as punishment for looking in the first place. Alex can have whatever feelings she wants, including none at all, and it's none of your fucking business.

"Hey," you say at last, as you step around her, but it's the kind of _hey _that dismisses a conversation, not the kind that starts one. Closed off. Self-contained. The opposite of the way you used to approach Alex—plaintive and entitled. If nothing else, you want to show her that you understand. That regardless of how much she hurt you in the past, you know what you did and you take responsibility for the resulting shitshow, and you heard her when she said she wants nothing to do with you.

"Are they taking you to trial?" Alex says, once your backs are to each other.

You stop walking and blink several times, because you never expected her to answer, and this is the last thing you'd have guessed she would ask. "No," you say, looking over your shoulder, and you're proud of how even your voice sounds.

She nods once, satisfied, and turns the corner to pick up a phone. You've never seen her make a call before, and you wonder who she speaks to on the outside. Who calms her fears of confinement and listens to her stories about prison food and Nicky and rec room goodbye parties.

You wonder, but you keep walking. Because that's none of your fucking business anymore, either.


	3. Chapter 3

The only stool left in the electrical shop when you arrive is the one beside Nichols. You consider standing, but Luschek stares at you like he's cruising to send somebody to the SHU today. You sit.

He gives you a different lamp with a different problem, and in a new height of oblivious cruelty, he does not send either you or Nicky out on a job. You feel her watching you as you work, shaking her head each time she remembers some particularly damning thing you did. You itch to throw yourself on her mercy and ask about Alex—if she's sleeping, if Mendez has been harassing her since he got back, if her new prescription lenses came in.

To keep your tongue inside your mouth where it belongs, you think of how many times they could possibly have fucked in fifty-six days. You think about whether you should count by incidents or orgasms, and, if by orgasms, whether you should count each of theirs separately. If they fucked and then got interrupted and then started again, was that one or two?

"Chapman, yo, Chapman." Nicky snaps her fingers under your nose, and you realize she's been talking. "You, me, the dishwasher. Sound familiar?"

You look up to find Luschek watching you expectantly. "If you don't feel up to it, I can always send you back down the hill for a few days until you're ready," he says, mocking concern.

"No, no, she's up for it," Nicky says, digging her fingers into your upper arm and steering you off your stool and toward the door. "See ya."

She doesn't let go until you reach Red's reclaimed kitchen, where she shoves you backwards into the chainlink fence of the pantry.

"Shit, Chapman," she says. "Last thing I need is your fucking ass back in the fucking SHU."

"Sorry," you say, because what else is there?

"Do you think it's fun to watch Vause lose her fucking shit for two months," she says, as if you haven't spoken, "wondering if you're going to come back all mangled and deranged? You think that's easy?"

"No," you mumble.

"I didn't fucking hear you, Chapman."

"No!" You don't mean to shout, but you do, and you don't mean to push Nicky away from you with all the strength you have left, but you do that, too. "Don't you tell me what it's like to care about her. Don't you _fucking_ tell me."

"_Girls_." Red comes out of the open fridge with a can of tomatoes in her hand, peering at you over her blue frames. Nicky looks smug, until Red steps closer and smacks the back of her head. "You want to fix my dishwasher, or you want to go downstairs to tell Vause you've been pushing Chapman into walls? Which do you prefer?"

You don't bother telling Red that Alex isn't likely to give a rat's ass. But what's strange is that Nicky doesn't either.

"All right, Ma, shit, I got it," she says, rubbing her head.

Nichols refuses to speak to you for the rest of the morning, except to ask for screwdrivers or criticize your wiring.

You know it's lunchtime from the growing din on the other side of the kitchen wall, but Red can't make it through another meal without her dishwasher operational. Norma brings you trays piled high with the best side dishes, as payment for your trouble, and the two of you eat in silence on the kitchen floor.

That is, Nicky eats. You pick at a chicken patty and shove powdered mashed potatoes from side to side until your tray looks like a Van Gogh. You starved in the SHU, and now that you're out you don't have the stomach for eating. The irony isn't lost on you.

"Nicky?" A strained, low voice comes from the hallway. Her voice. Alex rounds the stove in a fury. "Where the fuck—?" She stops abruptly when she sees you sitting together beside your toolbox. "Oh."

You force yourself not to look down at your lap like a jilted, lovesick teenager. You and Alex have to coexist in the same place for another ten months—plus whatever gets added to your sentence for Doggett—and you're going to learn to be an adult around her even if it fucking kills you.

The longer you look, the more the anger in her eyes seems like worry. Had she noticed Nicky didn't show up for lunch and thought she'd been electrocuted in the shop? Had she heard the two of you were working together and thought you might have taken a screwdriver to her new toy, à la Pennsatucky?

"Calm your tits, Vause," says Nichols, chewing on a biscuit. "I didn't let Blondie go back to the box, though she did try."

They're talking about you like you're not there, like you're a child, and you feel your ears turning red. But mostly you feel your insides doing flip-flops, because apparently what Alex was worried about was, well... _you_.

Her lips come together in a thin, stony line, one you remember from her meetings with disappointing business associates. For a second, you think she's about to rip you a new one. In the end she glances down at your still-full tray. "Finish that," she snaps, and then she walks away.

You do it, not because Alex is your goddamn keeper or because Nicky gives you her bored stare until you pick up your spork, but because you know you owe her one. And if this is what she wants—for you to choke down cold chicken product and colder potato mush until you're ready to gag—well fucking fine. You can handle it, because what you did to her was worse, and at least this means she cares in some tiny, minuscule way. Even if it's just so she can stop worrying about your scrawny arms and get on with her life.

After dinner, while everyone is at the send-off for the inmate you don't know, you take your first shower since the SHU. You wanted to do it this morning, to get the stale smell and the feel of Mendez's hands off of you, but the closest stalls to the newbies' bunks are the ones in the Suburbs, and Alex showers in the mornings.

Beneath the biting spray, you take stock of your jutting hip bones and knobby knees. You shave every shaveable inch of your skin. The last time you had a razor in the shower was when Pennsatucky held one to your throat. You lather up twice just because you can, and you try not to think of the time in Brussels when Alex washed you six separate times in one shower because you couldn't get enough of her soap-slick fingers between your legs.

"You flooding the Nile in there or what?"

Alex, on the other side of the curtain, sounds amused.

You freeze, the soap clutched between your hand and your neck. Does she know it's you?

"I've been waiting twenty minutes, Morello, Jesus Christ. You've gotta start fucking Nichols again so you can take care of your needs in the chapel instead of my shower."

You open your mouth to tell her it isn't Lorna, but she jerks the curtain to the side before you get the words out.

You stumble backwards into the corner, and the cocky grin falls from her lips. She moves as if she means to turn away, but can't—can't tear her eyes from your ribs and the way your hips protrude. You fold your shaking arms over your chest, where you used to have boobs. Her knuckles clench white where they're holding up her towel.

"Sorry," you say. "I wasn't... I thought you showered in the morning."

She looks you in the eye, finally, and tells you things change. But her startled gaze falls right back to your torso. There's nowhere for you to hide even if you wanted to. Her mouth is open and she licks her lips, but not in the way you'd want her to when she's looking at your naked body.

"Shit, Piper. I could tell from your face it was bad, but... shit."

In your mind, you make a crack about _the ever-articulate Miss Vause_, but you don't say it out loud. Neither of you is anywhere near there yet. You're miles from _there_—leagues, football fields, lightyears. You stand stock still until at last she lets the curtain fall, and your heart slows its jackrabbit pace.

"Take your time," she says softly, from outside. "I'll shower in the Ghetto. Fischer owes me one."

It's quiet in the bathroom after that. Which is lucky, because it takes a good five minutes for your muscles to loosen up enough to wash all the soap away.

As you step out of the shower, wrapped in a towel and wishing for a robe, you see a rose tattoo and a flash of black hair disappear into the hall.


	4. Chapter 4

On your third day out of the SHU, you call a cease and desist on your pity party. Feeling sorry for yourself is just as self-indulgent as blaming other people for your problems, and you've learned your lesson—mostly—about self-indulgence. Your abysmal state of affairs might be your own fucking fault, in more ways than one, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to enjoy talking on the phone with Polly or reading with Taystee in the library. It doesn't mean you have to take up sleeping as a hobby.

You force your lips to smile when you sit down in the shop with Nicky and Watson. Even though it's lopsided and even though Watson looks at you like you're constipated, it feels better than scowling.

The three of you work on a set of fluorescent lighting tubes for most of the day. Nicky alternates between talking about Alex and ignoring you. She seems unable to decide whether it's more hurtful to tell you exactly how much you've screwed Alex over, or to withhold information about her entirely.

You aren't sure which is worse, either. But you tolerate whatever Nicky rains on you, because you know it comes from a place of love for Alex, and Alex deserves to have someone who defends her so fiercely. It should have been you, but it's not. So it's her. And that's the way it is now.

Still, you can't help but wonder why—if Nicky and Alex are an item—Alex would want Morello to be fucking her in the chapel.

Alex has never been good at sharing, despite the enlightened speeches about openness and freedom she liked to make at parties. She sometimes had to sleep with her mules—_to bend them to my will_, she'd said once, with a stage cackle—and in return you had a free pass to bang whomever you pleased, as long as you didn't bring your conquests home. You used it now and then, in the spirit of keeping things equal, and by the time you got to Europe it drove Alex so crazy she changed the rules. She stopped fucking drug mules, and you stopped getting trashed in bars and pretending the people you met were Alex. You wonder now if her self-imposed fidelity was part of the reason the business started going to hell.

Old Piper would have glared and stomped and accused until Nicky confessed to fucking Alex. SHU Piper would have curled up in a ball, sobbing, until she put you out of your misery.

Instead, you wait until Nicky finishes telling Watson about how Alex sprained her ankle while running off her stress in the yard, look her directly in the eye, and ask. "Are you with her?"

Nichols doesn't stop fiddling with the lead-in wires. "What's it to you, Chapman?"

You lick your dry lips. "I just want to make sure she has someone." It's the truth but not the whole truth, so help you God.

"Course she has someone. A lot of fucking someones who'll look out for her." Nicky eyes you, sucking her teeth, until she seems to make a decision. "But no, it ain't like that," she says, connecting the cathode to the exhaust tube. "Not that I haven't gone there, mind you."

You nod, pushing away memories of the time Nicky sat in Alex's bunk, looking sated and smug, while you were sent away. You should feel relieved they're not still together. And you do. But it's more complicated than that, because with Alex Vause it always is.

At dinner, you sit with Sophia and Sister Ingalls because they invite you to, and because their table offers a poor view of Alex. You stay because their discussion engages you in ideas outside yourself. Even though your contribution amounts to little more than an occasional hum of agreement, you feel like you're a part of something.

Leanne Taylor, Doggett's dead-eyed disciple, stops at your table on the way to bus her tray.

"She's gonna get her lesbian on you, Sister," she says to Ingalls. "What will God think?"

"I don't think he'll notice," Ingalls says calmly, her eyes on her salad.

"He will, Tiffany said he will and she has the divine light. And then you're gonna go even more to hell than Catholics already do."

Between the mention of Pennsatucky's name and the meth head's proximity to you, a hush has fallen over the dining hall. You glance around and realize the entire prison is waiting to see whether you'll go batshit on Taylor, or whether you're still the same prissy-ass college bitch they pegged you for when you arrived.

"_Even more to hell_?" Sophia repeats, her lips pursed in condescending amusement. "Girl, please."

But Leanne has already started advancing on you. You stand up from your seat and tower over her, and you hear a hissed _Daaamn_ from one of the Spanish Harlem tables.

You hate that this is who you are now, a person who might just haul off and fuck someone up because she said the wrong thing to you. But it was always who you were, you suppose—you just couldn't see it until Pennsatucky. Even Alex had known, back when she'd pinned your arms to your sides in Bali because you wanted to strangle some crazed mule who'd threatened her. She'd whispered in your ear as you struggled. _That temper's going to be the death of you, Pipes_.

At least now you know, too, and can figure out how to deal with it.

"I'm not in the mood, Taylor," you say quietly. "Go sit down."

"Bitch lesbian sinner thinks she can boss me around," Leanne says, looking around for backup. A few of Doggett's old crew chuckle, but it seems the bible-thumpers have decentralized since losing their savior.

Over her shoulder, you see Taystee and Poussey stand up. "Yeah, I do," you say. "You know what happened to Pennsatucky." Your voice is soft and even, but the threat is clear. It's not one you plan to follow through, but she doesn't have to know that.

"Uh huh, and the only reason you're standing here instead of her is 'cause you got fucking lesbian mob connections. But she got _God_," Leanne says, poking one finger into your chest, "and you ain't got nothing no more."

You can't help but think of what Doggett said to you that night in the yard. She was right, in a way, and Taylor is, too.

"I know you didn't, girl," Taystee says incredulously, coming down the aisle. "I know you did not just finger Chapman."

At the next table, you hear Nicky snicker at Taystee's choice of words.

"Look, Leanne—" you start to say.

"No, you look!" She seems infuriated that you aren't taking her seriously, and alongside her anger, you realize, is pain. "If it weren't for your satan lesbo shit, Tiffany'd be here still."

She jabs you again, and this time you knock her hand away with your wrist. Your new thing is taking blame where blame is due, but you are not going to stand here and be abused by a hick zealot just because her psycho friend tried to murder you.

She steps forward, her fingers shaking as they curl into a fist. When she enters your personal space, you hear the scrape of dinner trays being pushed away. Morello and Big Boo get out of their seats, and Suzanne jumps up looking as crazy-eyed as you've ever seen her. Even Nicky stands, hands in her sweatshirt pockets, and takes a step toward you. Alex stays where she is, but her eyes are trained on Taylor with an intensity that makes you shudder. She grips the edge of the table so hard that you feel glad formica doesn't have nerve endings.

Leanne glances from side to side, but you wouldn't be surprised if her walnut brain doesn't quite get that she's surrounded. You keep your palms raised in front of you just in case. All you can think about is being hauled back to the SHU, and you feel your triceps begin to tremble.

"You don't wanna ride this train, Sweetcheeks," says Big Boo to Taylor, her hand resting on Alex's shoulder. "It's not going anywhere you wanna be."

The tension in the cafeteria almost suffocates you. Leanne glances from you to Boo to Alex, until at last she backs down with a fuming grimace. She tells you to watch yourself, that next time you won't have your friends and you'll be sorry.

But you know you've won. For now.

Later, Sophia rubs your back as you hyperventilate into her sink.

* * *

_Thanks for all the follows and kind words! This is my first _Orange Is the New Black_ fic, so I love hearing what you guys think :)_


	5. Chapter 5

You aren't sure you're strong enough for yoga yet, but Yoga Jones smiles at you when you come in and roll out a mat. You're here to do the stretches, whatever you can manage, and definitely not because Alex is on the other side of the room for her AA meeting.

Once you thought she only came to AA to ogle you—and, later, to ambush you—but now you think maybe she comes because it helps her. A good chunk of your time in the SHU was spent contemplating her addiction—how much you were to blame and how much she was.

You had eventually concluded it was Alex's responsibility to make choices for Alex. But that doesn't mean you don't still feel guilty as hell when you see her in that orange chair.

Back in the day, the bleak reality of her work almost never touched you—she made sure of it. But there was that one night in Paris, two weeks before you fled. Alex had been leaving you at home more and more during her late-night meetings. She said it was for your safety, but you were lonely and bored and you thought maybe she was fucking her mules again, so you insisted she take you along to a six-story club on the west end of the Champs-Élysées.

You got drunk on twenty-euro sidecars, and when Alex said you'd had enough you told her to fuck off. She went home. You kept dancing until you had to pee, and that was when you found Fahri's overdosed mule dead in the back room. Her body was surrounded by men in bespoke suits who sniggered about what a _fucking disgusting addict cunt_ she was, and you knew, with sudden clarity, that the only difference between you and this girl was Alex's affection and a couple syringes of smack. When you got home, she was already asleep. You didn't wake her. In the morning, you sent out your dress so she wouldn't see you'd thrown up on yourself on your way to the cab.

But even after that, even after you saw what her business could do, you never, ever imagined Alex would be the one slumped on a velvet sofa with needle tracks in her arms.

Never.

You swear you can feel her eyes on your back as you ease into cobra, but every time you turn around she's dutifully studying the inmate who's sharing at the podium, an older black woman named Ella or Elsie or something with an _E-L_.

She makes you miss Miss Claudette, and you spend the rest of yoga wondering whether that's racist.

* * *

Saturday is day six post-solitary. You pass the morning pacing a hole in your floor while waiting for visitation. So... pretty much the same as in the SHU, only you're hoping for Polly instead of a CO.

"Ain't that what you got a track for, College?" Poussey says when she walks by the newbie bunks, library book in hand. You smile at the title, which you recognize as Taystee's favorite of the _Harry Potter_s. You wonder when she's finally going to grow a pair and ask your old bunkmate out on a prison date. There must be some kind of ritual for that. Picnic in the yard? A private table at movie night?

You're not sure. You and Alex sort of skipped that part.

When Bell finally calls your name from the front office, you spring down the hallway. You're scared Polly is going to beat you into a pulp re: the Larry situation, but mostly you're dying to feel her arms around you, exactly twice, and hear about everything you missed in months two and three of The Finn Show.

In the visitation room, though, the joy you'd felt—the first since the SHU—rushes from you like helium from a battered, stretched-out balloon.

Because Polly is not alone.

Larry sits next to her, and your heart slams painfully in your chest. It hurts to see him, to see the damage you've caused and peek in at the life you might have lived if things were different. If you were different.

Polly slinks away as Larry stands to hug you. You shoot eyeball venom at her over his shoulder, but she just mouths _Sorry, sorry, sorry_ as she disappears through the visitor exit.

It's not that you didn't plan to see him again. You just didn't anticipate doing it so soon, while you're both still so raw. You knew there would be practical matters to discuss about splitting furniture and separating bank accounts, but you've barely got your head on straight. This morning you made three separate comments at breakfast, and Sophia called it a milestone.

You are _so_ not equipped to deal with Larry yet.

He holds onto you a second too long, and your arms flop to your sides while he squeezes. He comments on your weight loss, but you think of the way Alex blanched when she saw you naked, and you know he has no idea. Not really.

You thank him for his concern. He fusses over why that bastard Healy didn't save you from the box and whether what they did to you was legal and how he plans to make a stink about it on NPR.

"Larry," you say, finally jolted out of wondering why he came. "I almost _killed_ someone."

"No," he interrupts, "it was self defense. You—"

"I almost _ended another person's life_. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm not entirely sure I shouldn't _still _be in the SHU." The fact that Pennsatucky was trying to shank you doesn't change the way her teeth cracked satisfyingly beneath your fist. You almost can't believe how lucky you got.

"Piper—" He sounds appalled.

"Why are you here, Larry?"

You're too tired to go through this with him, to listen to him invent reasons why you can still be the girl he'd planned to marry, if only everyone would just overlook the whole attempted murder thing.

He gets quiet, and it occurs to you that Polly would not have given up her visit just for you and Larry to spend thirty minutes dividing stocks and calling dibs on the vinyl collection.

"Larry," you say again. "Why are you here?"

And over a scratched brown table in a room full of felons, it all pours out. How he should never have broken it off, how he should have listened when you told him about Doggett, how all he could think about was how he'd let you spend eight weeks thinking he'd abandoned you.

If only you'd given this speech to Alex after her mother's funeral, you think. You'd be on a beach in Fiji right now, sipping Mai Tais and reminding her to put on to sunscreen. Alex would never have started using. She'd have retired from the cartel with grace and a bonus check, and the two of you would have taken up skydiving careers in South America.

Or something like that.

You know you're oversimplifying.

You know that Alex might have been destined for drugs regardless of your defection, or that Australia might have been better for falling out of planes. But you fantasize anyway. Because this—_this_—is what you spent eight weeks thinking about in the SHU. Not about how Larry abandoned you. About how _you _abandoned_ her_.

You jerk your hand away from his, even before Bell notices he reached out to grasp it. You're such a fucking fraud. Here is a kind, wholesome man who is ready to give you everything you thought you wanted, and all you can think about is attempted murder and finding yourself and a certain raven-haired convict who currently quasi-hates you.

You get that you can't have Alex. You get it. You can never have her again, maybe not even as a friend. But Larry doesn't deserve to play second fiddle to a memory.

And you don't deserve to spend your life trying to be someone you're not.

"I can't," you say abruptly, in the middle of his fourth apology. "Larry, I can't."

He frowns, rotating the watch on his wrist again and again. "I realize it's not going to be easy, but I—"

"No, that's not—" You grip the hair at your temples and scrunch your eyes closed, trying to find the words. "I'm not the girl from five months ago. I was never her."

"Look, Piper," he says, "I know you've been through hell, and I can't even begin to imagine what—"

"No, you can't. You can't imagine it, that's the problem."

He leans back in his chair, scoffing. "You're giving up on us because I've never been to solitary confinement?"

"No. That's not what I—" You lick your lips and try not to pull your hair out. "You think solitary is hell because I don't get to write letters and there's no sun and the food sucks. You think I hate prison because I have to miss holidays and I can't go to the farmer's market and phone calls are one-way. But it's so much _fucking _more than that, Larry." You clutch the arms of your purple chair and shake your head. "It's hell for me because of _me_. Because I see who I am, without a filter, and I only sometimes like what I find. You can't imagine what it's like because you can't comprehend that I have demons. You can't imagine that I have thoughts and feelings and needs that don't fit into a two-car garage in Westchester."

He opens his mouth to speak, but you don't let him.

"And that's my fault, Larry," you say over whatever objection he was going to make. "That's on me, because I tried _so hard_ to keep myself from you. I tried so fucking hard to only let you see the parts that fit. And you fell in love with this fraction of me that doesn't represent the whole. It never did. But it's only now, in here, that I can see that. And that's why I can't do it anymore. Because I have to be my whole self now, demons and fuckups and just _all_ of it."

It's the most you've spoken in two months, and your throat burns.

"It's her, isn't it?" he says, voice wavering. He's trying not to cry.

"No." And it's true. Alex was the reason you began to figure out what a liar you'd been—to him and to yourself—but it's so far beyond that now. You need to do this whether or not she's there to catch you afterwards. "We're not together," you say, and it hurts more than anything you've told him so far.

"But you're still in love with her, aren't you?"

You don't answer.

It's the loudest silence of your life.

"I'm so sorry, Larry," you say, standing up. It comes out more like a hoarse jumble of gasps.

You're gone before he can reach out to stop you.

In the search room, Fischer lets you sob in the corner for 30 seconds before you have to strip. As if that's all you need to pull yourself together.

* * *

When you get back inside, it's obvious you've been crying.

You can tell from the cold air on your wet cheeks, and from the way Flaca and Maritza look you up and down like you're contagious.

By some miracle, you make it to the bathroom without running into Leanne or the rest of her ragtag team of meth heads. The last thing you need is for them to think you're still as much of a chicken shit as the girl who cried in the shower over a little blood—which you basically are. Beating the living daylights out of Pennsatucky did a lot to improve your street cred, but not much for your lackluster aptitude for prison fights. You can't afford for them to think of you as weak.

If you were at home, you'd spend six days on the couch, weeping over Larry with Polly and a gallon of mint chocolate chip.

Instead, you splash icy water on your face for a minute straight, until you're sure you've frozen your tear ducts closed. You feel relieved to have some resolution, finally. But that doesn't mean you don't feel like a pepper that's been chewed up and spit out into a cup. You did love him. Or at least, a fraction of you did.

"Nice speech, Chapman."

You look up to see Nicky's reflection in the mirror. She has a towel slung over her shoulder and slurps a handful of water into her mouth to gargle.

Was she in the visitation room? You rack your brain. As soon as you'd seen that Polly had sold you out, you went tunnel vision on Larry. You feel queasy—that is, queasier than your new norm. There's no way in hell you could have missed Alex's presence. But who else had been there? Was the entire prison now privy to your innermost thoughts and relational screwups?

"Sometimes I forget I'm never alone here," you say uncertainly. You can't tell if her smirk is meant to mock you or offer her sympathies.

"Look on the bright side, P," she says, shaking the excess water off a toothbrush. "Now that you kicked Jewfro to the curb, maybe Crazy Eyes will take you back."

You let out a short, rueful laugh. "If only I should be so blessed."

Nichols bumps your shoulder with hers on her way out. "Never know," she says.

You smile. Maybe it's not so bad that she overheard your rant to Larry. Maybe now you're a little more human to her, and a little less creature-from-the-yuppie-lagoon who broke Alex's heart.

"Her name is Suzanne," you call to Nicky's retreating back.

One of the showers turns off behind you, and out of it steps Alex.

Of _course_.

"They _really _need name tags for those things," you say to her reflection, exasperated, before you can remember that making snarky comments to Alex Vause is high on the list of Things You Are Not To Do, right after declaring your undying love and blaming her for your incarceration.

But she just laughs. "How would I lurk, then?"

You try to smile, but all you manage is a grimace. Now that your brain has regained control of your mouth, you struggle for words. This is where you would once have come back with a witty rejoinder, but all you can think about is where the line is between mindless banter and running to her with your problems. That and—god_damn_ it—how absurdly hot she looks, dripping wet and with only a towel between you and her skin.

She considers you in the mirror, as if she wants to say something else. You glance down at your hands on the edge of the sink.

When you look up, she's gone.


	6. Chapter 6

After dinner, you play checkers with Poussey and discuss Severus Snape's tortured soul.

"He only did it 'cause of love," she says, taking your king. "Shit's cold."

Intermittent whispers at the neighboring tables tell you that word of your visitation room breakdown has traveled fast. You try to ignore them. Alex already knows what happened, thanks to Nicky—maybe got a full report after her shower, even—and her opinion on the situation is the only one you care about.

"Listen," Poussey says as you glance around self-consciously, "Daya tossed her cookies on Bennett, Taystee saw it. And that shit is _way_ funnier than you, College. You old news soon."

Not that you should expect Alex to have an opinion at all, you remind yourself.

But maybe.

Just before count, Big Boo stands up from where she sits with her radio and instigates a dance-off. Mendez is on duty, she says, so freaky is welcome.

You don't get up to dance, but when Boo pulls a protesting Morello from her chair and grinds on her to Justin Timberlake, you laugh—really, openly, honestly laugh—for the first time since the SHU.

No, that's not right. The first time since… when was it? Definitely before you told Alex you picked Larry. Before you found out she had named you.

You can't remember, but you remember she was there.

"Gonna be your ass out here next time, Goldilocks," shouts Boo, as she mimes spanking Morello's uniform.

You grin, watching as Nichols strolls in through the double doors, her eyes trained on Lorna. "If you live through the night," you tell Big Boo.

Boo makes a show of backing off of Morello, but Nicky holds her arms wide, smiling, as she hops up to sit on a table. "By all means, carry on," she says. "Ain't I ever told you guys I'm in here for voyeurism?"

She watches Morello dance with a familiar glint in her eyes, one that makes your insides clench. It's the same one Alex got when she watched you strip, that night she invited you to Bali. The same one you saw over and over again in clubs around the world.

Because while Alex Vause did not like to share, she really, _really _fucking liked to watch.

She would peer over the velvet ropes of VIP balconies in lavish resorts and watch you dance on the floor below while her underlings bickered about drop dates and payouts. You would catch her gaze at the climax of songs, as strangers ran their hands over you and the lights pulsed, and you'd hold it until you were sure her eyes would burn your skin. Afterwards she would fuck you blind in the cab or the back of the bar, growling _Mine_ in you ear as you came. Again and again and again.

It was one of these nights that you surprise squirted.

The party continues until the bell goes off, inmates grinding and laughing under the glare of fluorescent lights. Alex shows up at the end to lean against the doorframe, arms folded, and smile at the dancers.

Maybe, you think. Maybe next time you'll take Boo up on her offer.

* * *

Eight months.

That's how much time you get added to your sentence because of Pennsatucky. No—because of what you _did_ to Pennsatucky. Caputo makes it clear you should be very, very grateful to the DA for letting the Department of Corrections handle your punishment internally. You could have been charged with aggravated assault, he says—or attempted murder, if they'd really wanted to fuck you over. He throws around words like _twenty years_ and _max_, and his office swims in front of your eyes. While he unloads his gripes with the legal profession on you, you think about how Alex had asked you days ago if you were being taken to trial.

Does she just _know_ these things about the prison system? Are they part of the drug importer handbook, right after Appendix A: How to Seduce Mules?

Or had she looked into your situation specifically?

You wonder how you could find out as you trudge from Caputo's office, unsure whether to give a triumphant whoop or weep in the toilet stall.

You haven't spoken to Alex since she overheard you and Nicky talking in the bathroom. Your only regular interaction is at the meals where she happens to face you from a neighboring table. She makes a point to look down at your tray from across the aisle, then raise a challenging eyebrow. _Really? _she seems to say. _I broke my fucking heart for you all over again and you can't even eat your fucking rice?_

Half of you feels warmed by her concern, and the other half is annoyed by her superior, condescending eye-speak. But it's working. Little by little, you've put on weight. Two pounds, then three, until finally the sight of food doesn't make you nauseated anymore. You still have a ways to go, but at least you can no longer count each of the ribs attached to your sternum when you look in the mirror. On the day Yoga Jones said you looked healthy enough for downward-facing dog, you swore you saw Alex smirking in her orange AA chair.

In the afternoon, you take your laundry downstairs for the first time since you got back from solitary. You'd skipped your first laundry day on account of survival instinct—you were pretty sure your SHU-fried brain would short circuit at another icy reception from Alex.

Now, you feel silly that you didn't just ovary up and get your washing done. As you turn the corner by the dryers, you hope she didn't notice.

Leanne folds pillowcases on a table, glaring at you like you murdered the baby Jesus, but you walk straight to the back. When you first came out of the SHU, you probably would have preferred to ask her for help instead of Alex—so you figure this is progress.

Alex comes out from behind the machines, eyes on the shirt she's folding. "You can just—" She stops mid-sentence when she sees you. "Oh."

"Hey," you say, clutching your laundry bag against your chest.

"Hey."

Does her voice sound different when she knows it's you? You think so. It's only one syllable, but the raspy word is enough to make you shiver in your work boots.

She looks at you expectantly, eyebrows raised, and suddenly you feel like you have to justify yourself. "It's my laundry day," you say, defensive.

Her face softens the tiniest bit, and she takes your bag from your hand. "I know."

You feel your brows knitting together. "You know it's my laundry day?"

"No." Her lips quirk up for a second as she writes out your tag, but the smile is gone just as fast. "I mean I know you've been respecting what I said." She nods once, solemnly, which you remember as the _thank you_ she gives when she really doesn't want to say thank you.

You take the stub she holds out and try not to stare at the way her handwriting curves around your name. "Thanks, by the way," you say, as you slip the tag into your sweatshirt pocket. "For the box."

Alex blinks behind her glasses, her expression blank. "What box?"

So it wasn't her. She wasn't the one who kept your things for you. You spin away, feeling hot under your uniform collar. "Never mind," you say quickly, thinking of nothing but how to escape before she figures out what you thought she had done for you.

You make it as far as Leanne's folding table before her voice stops you short.

"Hey. Kid," she says.

Wearily, you turn your head back toward her. "Yeah?"

Her gaze pierces you, then flicks down to the table. "You're welcome."


	7. Chapter 7

Two weeks out of the SHU, you get assigned to a real bunk. It's in the Suburbs, and your palms sweat beneath your pile of stuff as O'Neill leads you down the empty block. The chance you'll be matched with Alex is miniscule, but you wouldn't put it past the COs to fuck with you like that. To fuck with _her_ like that.

But O'Neill marches right past the cube that houses a box labeled _Vause, Alex_ and stops outside the bunks next door.

"This is you, inmate." He tips a nonexistent hat at you, then returns to the bubble.

You expect to feel relief at dodging the sleeping-across-from-Alex bullet. Instead, disappointment creeps in as you make up your bed. And then, frustration.

Because what did you expect, exactly? That the DOC would orchestrate the dramatic reconciliation of your epic love story, and by the end of the day you and Alex would be skipping through the yard together with ribbons in your hair and trumpets playing?

You arrange your books on the shelf, annoyed, and wonder who your bunkmate actually is.

You tell yourself to stop being such an idiot.

"Welcome home, Chapman." Morello walks in from the hall, grinning. She's on her way to lunch, she says, but she comes over to hug you. You guess she's allowed to like you when Nicky isn't around, or maybe Team Alex's anti-Piper rules have softened.

"Thanks," you say, smoothing out your blanket. "It's nice to have a place, you know?"

"I certainly do," she says, her voice squeaking through her fire engine lipstick. She glances at your roommate's bed, and you see concern darken her face.

You turn to look, too. "Who's that?"

"No big deal," she says brightly, fiddling with the sleeve of her jacket. "I'm sure it'll be fine." You give her your best _I beat people up in the yard_ look, and though she knows you're kidding, she melts. "All right, it's Taylor. But—"

"I thought Leanne bunked with Alex," you say, interrupting.

"Well..." She pauses, as if she's unsure how much she should let slip. "There was an altercation."

"Alex got in a fight with Leanne?" You feel your eyes growing into saucers. "What happened? Is she okay? Did she go to the SHU?" The thought of her down in solitary with you, neither aware of the other, makes your stomach flip. Or was it possible this happened just today, and she was down the hill _right now_? "Fuck, is she—?"

"No, no, no," Morello says, holding up her hands. "Take a breather, Chapman. She just made a coupla, ya know, threats in Taylor's general direction. And maybe one of 'em was with her fist. I mean maybe."

Your mouth falls open. Sure, Alex is sort of a criminal mastermind, but you've never known her to lose control like that—like you did.

"We took care of it," Lorna says modestly. "Ya know, kept it under wraps. Nicky paid the Diaz girl a shitload of Snickers to get Bennett to switch her and Taylor's bunks, and badda boom. They still see each other, of course, but it ain't like it was."

You nod, your brain stuck on the part where Nicky and Alex share a cube now.

Morello pats your shoulder. "She was real torn up about it, that's all," she says. "What Pennsatucky did to you."

"Oh," you say, trying to squash this new information into your crumpled, fragmented picture of Alex's feelings for you. "Right."

The look on your face must tell Morello that she has, in fact, revealed too much.

"Like I said." She backs out of the block, pointing at you with both hands. "Welcome home."

* * *

After dinner, you're still not quite ready to become part of the Suburbs' general population.

It's Leanne you're afraid to face, you tell yourself, not Alex. Definitely Leanne.

And truth be told, you _are _sort of terrified to close your eyes beside someone who believed your imminent murder to be part of God's master plan.

Instead of settling into your new cube, you hide out on the floor of the library with a dog-eared, six-month-old copy of _National Geographic_, tuning out Taystee's humming as she shelves books. A table of inmates you don't know debate the merits of their appeal letters, while Sister Ingalls jots notes in a book about a theoretical meeting between Buddha and Jesus Christ.

It's almost like old times, and you feel calm in your hideout. Safe, even—until a pair of hesitant black boots find their way into your corner.

You look up to see who the boots belong to, but as you take in the intruder—the impossibly long legs, the crossed arms, the halfway-hardened look behind dark glasses—you realize you already knew it was Alex. Even the sound of her footfalls is ingrained in you, somehow.

She sits down three feet away, leaning against the bookshelf perpendicular to yours.

She does not acknowledge your presence.

You try to keep reading the article that's open on your knees, the one about micro cottages or adult treehouses or something equally inane. Every time you force your eyes back to the glossy photos, you promise yourself you will not glance up at Alex again. You promise yourself you will act like it's completely normal for the two of you to sit next to each other while pretending you're not.

And each and every time, you fail just as fucking miserably as the last.

"All the chairs are taken," she says gruffly, the fifteenth time you eye her. She flips to the next page of _Sophie's Choice_.

"Oh." You nod, though she doesn't look at you. "Okay."

You bite your lip to hide your smile. Through the gaps in the stacks, you spot at least three empty seats.

* * *

And thus it begins: the longest hour you've suffered in recent memory. It's torture to have Alex right beside you but just out of reach, close enough to feel but not close enough to touch. It's comparable, you find, to the way an hour passes in the box.

She leaves first—to go to AA, you think—and you're almost relieved. You finish the magazine and start a second before you feel mostly recovered from your ordeal.

When you return, at last, to the Suburbs, all eyes are on you.

Except Alex's. And Leanne's.

It's the final count, and Taylor stands at the door to the cube, coughing and looking furious. You glance at Morello for an explanation once Mendez has clicked in your side of the block, but she just shrugs. Alex stares straight ahead, then disappears into her bunk. You watch over the low wall as she sits down in her bed, focused intently on the book in her hands. It's the same one she was reading earlier.

Leanne gets under her blanket. You do the same, nervously, but she just rolls over to face the wall.

Well then.

You curl into a comma when the lights go out, back to the cement, and think about how Alex's back is only a foot from yours. How all that separates you is a few inches of wall and blanket—and, of course, vast oceans of mistakes. Hers and yours.

You scoot backwards until your shoulder blades are pressed against the cold grey paint. When you hold your breath, you can almost hear her on the other side, sighing deeply and rustling her covers. You listen in quiet desperation until your vision edges with purple and your lungs contract painfully in your chest. When you finally suck in air, you imagine her arms closing around your body.

Sleep eludes you, mostly because you force your eyes to remain open despite their longing to close. You've been having nightmares. Sometimes you see yourself back in the SHU, and sometimes Alex stands in the little square window, telling you she's glad you're locked up. Other times it's her in the box, begging you not to leave—though you always, always do. Once you saw Healy locked in there with her. The floor was covered in blood, and that night you woke up screaming.

The orange jumpsuits you bunked with were too scared of you—the resident hick beater—to complain about your noise. But you heard two of them whispering together once. _Who's Alex?_ one had said. _Fuck if I know._

You don't know if they learned the name from the prison grapevine, or if you called out to her in your sleep. But you can't take the risk. Not here.

* * *

When you rise at dawn, Alex is already up and gone.

Leanne is still in the cube, and you cautiously catch her eye while she dresses for work. To your surprise, the self-righteous loathing from days ago is gone. It's been replaced by fear. And—somehow, mercifully—by an obvious desire to have absolutely nothing to do with you.

As Leanne flees, it suddenly occurs to you that maybe Alex left the library last night to do something other than attend AA. You remember Leanne coughing, and the blood in your veins starts to run cold. Doesn't Alex know how fast Caputo would throw her into the SHU if she got caught threatening Taylor? Your hands fumble with the waistband of your pants. What the fuck was she thinking?

"She's got a lotta guilt, that's all," says Morello. She comes to stand outside your cube as you tug your arms through a fresh khaki shirt, which is still loose. Too late, you realize you've been staring at Alex's bed.

The shirt is halfway over your head when you stop and look at her, frowning.

"Ya know," she explains, "that she didn't protect you from Doggett."

"_Alex_?"

Nichols sidles up behind Morello, slinging an arm across her shoulders. She steers Lorna toward the dining hall. "I know," she says to you. "Surprised me, too, Blondie."


	8. Chapter 8

You go to the library again the next night, after picking at your Salisbury steak between Sophia and Yoga Jones.

You know it's ridiculous to hope Alex will come back—that she was probably just sitting guard to make sure Taylor didn't murder you before she had a chance to bully her into nonviolence.

But you can't help hoping anyway.

While you wait, you picture every horrific thing that might befall her if Leanne snitches to the COs. Just as you're about to give up and go challenge Taystee to a round of exhausted, anxious Scrabble, the black boots find you again.

She sits down in the same spot with the same book. When you glance up at her, barely concealing your relieved grin, she gives you the same silent treatment as yesterday.

But tonight you don't care. Tonight you just breathe in her scent and thank every deity you can name that Alex is whole and safe and here.

With you.

* * *

On the third night Alex comes to the library, you don't bother to hide your pleasure. You smile at her as she sits down—six inches closer to you than yesterday, you're sure of it.

This time, she breaks her silence and asks if you've been sleeping.

You feel like the walking dead and you know dark circles cushion your eyes, but you say yes.

She seems unconvinced. "You don't have to worry about Taylor," she says quietly, opening her book.

"I know." You hope your voice conveys both your gratitude and your discomfort with the risk she took in warning Doggett's minion away from you. "And thank you for that. But I can handle Leanne."

Most days, you believe it. On others, you remember the hollow way she looked at you while her friend smeared her blood across your skin. The look that said you were less than a person. You weren't sure, when you first got back, if Taystee had told Alex about everything that happened that day in the showers. After moving into the Suburbs, you're pretty damn sure.

You know Leanne antagonized her when you were first sent to solitary. This morning before breakfast, you badgered Lorna into confessing what Leanne had told Alex when they were alone in their cube—that you were a sinner, that you deserved what you got, that if you ever came back, she would finish Tiffany's holy mission.

"Really," you add, in what you hope is a reassuring tone. As grateful as you are that Taylor no longer seems interested in shanking you, you will not let Alex continue to put herself in danger. If Leanne wants to whisper threats to you in the halls to make herself feel better about losing Doggett, fine. You'll find a way to deal with it yourself. What you cannot deal with is Alex in the box because of you.

She just shrugs.

"And I really am sleeping," you say.

Alex purses her lips the way she did once in Indonesia, when you claimed you weren't jealous of her business associates.

As she turns back to her book, you want to ask her why she still cares. Why she still has your back. You want to ask her whether it means what you desperately want it to mean, but you're scared of the answer.

You're _this_ close to asking anyway, despite your fear, when the alarm goes off. You flatten your body on the cold library floor, hands folded on the back of your neck. Bennett and Maxwell make rounds, bickering about which of them left the gate to the track open after hours.

When your spine gets cramped and you turn to lie on the other cheek, you find Alex's face inches from yours. She's watching you. Up close, the feelings she's been trying to hide from her eyes—the worry and frustration and anger and longing—make your breath catch.

You mean to break eye contact. You do. You mean to look politely away until the piercing screech above comes to an end.

Instead, you lie side by side, staring. In her eyes, you're transported to another time. To a hundred other times before everything went wrong, when you and Alex would lie as mirror images, after sex or pastimes more mundane, and wonder at your tremendous luck. Before Paris. Before you began to feel like just another mule to her. Even here, sometimes, before Larry and before the SHU.

It's the stare that always makes you think _inevitable_.

* * *

On the fourth night, Alex brings you a book.

It's just a dusty old library copy, but you cradle the spine like it's more precious than any gem she ever gave you.

It is.

"Faulkner," you say to the novel's cover. You're surprised by her choice of olive branch as much as the gesture itself. "I thought you weren't a fan."

She slides down to sit against the wall. "People change."

You tuck the book against your knees, your ancient _Newsweek_ forgotten on the floor. "I don't think so," you say. "I think people learn how to be who they already are."

One side of her mouth tugs back in wry amusement. "So I _always_ secretly loved verbose, alcoholic Southerners."

"Yep," you say, matter-of-fact. You trace the letters of _As I Lay Dying_ with your thumb. "You always, always loved them, underneath everything. You just didn't know how yet."

When you glance up, Alex is watching you the way she used to, the way she did before she got so busy she barely saw you at all. The way that makes you feel like she can peer into your soul through your eyes, as if they're a pair of peepholes in an already drafty door.

It doesn't take long for her stare to do to you what it always has—for it to knock your flimsy door right down. After several moments where your heart seems to beat in double time, you clear your throat and look away.

"I read _The Sound and the Fury _while you were in the SHU," Alex says, answering your initial question. "Decided the old bastard was all right." Her tone is easy—light, even—but you can feel the weight behind her words.

You swallow your nerves, thinking of the photograph you'd hidden in that book's pages. "Was it my copy you read?" You try to sound as if you're just curious. As if it matters as much to you as whether she put on white socks or grey this morning.

"Why?" she says, pushing her glasses to the top of her head. Her voice is too innocent, too calculating, and you know she found the picture. "Was there something special about it?"

"Did you—?" You cut yourself off, feeling color creep up your neck. "Never mind." You crack open your new gift and try to read, but the words wobble on the page.

"Did I what? Burn it?" Alex raises an eyebrow. "I thought about it," she muses, but her half-smile softens the blow. "But then what would I have taken as my finder's fee?"

"You took the photo?" You can't keep the shock from your voice. "I mean, you kept it?"

She slides her glasses back onto her nose and opens the green leather-bound book she's been holding in her lap. She reads three pages before she answers.

"Maybe."

* * *

In the morning, you and Nicky are called to the kitchen on a work order. She puts her hand on your shoulder as soon as you're out of sight of Luschek, and you're proud you manage not to flinch. You can count on your fingers the number of times you've been touched since you got out of solitary, and not all of them have been pleasant.

"You a-okay, P?" Nicky says. "Saw you with Pornstache after breakfast. Vause almost tore my arm off trying to jump him. Fortunately for her, I got guns." She makes a show of kissing her flexed bicep as you cross the yard.

You frown. "Prisoners get patted down all the time." Not that the frequency of the harassment makes you want to vomit any less when Mendez feels you up.

"Sure." She shrugs, pulling open the double doors that lead back into the prison. Her voice drops when you pass Fischer. "But it ain't every day your ladylove gets manhandled by a mustachioed child molester."

Your sleep-deprived brain is stuck on repeat at the word _love_, and you hardly notice when Taystee joins you for the segment of the walk between the Ghetto and the rec room. "Alex isn't stupid," you say skeptically, when your synapses start firing again. "She'd never try to attack a CO."

Nichols rolls her eyes. "That girl does a lot of stupid shit where you're concerned."

You hear a dramatic _Mm-hmm _from Taystee, and your palms get slick against the microwave you're carrying. You think of Leanne, and you're struck by a sudden, acute need to know everything that happened while you were in the SHU. "Like what?" You look to Taystee, but she's already turning into the rec room. "What stupid shit?"

"Nothing, Chapman. Nothing." Nicky shakes her head, adjusting the tools in her arms. She walks into the kitchen ahead of you. "Just the usual: moping, self-blame. You know."

Nichols has warmed up considerably since Larry visited, but you're never sure when she's fucking with you. You have no illusions about which half of your ill-fated romance her loyalties lie with.

"I'm not worried about Mendez," you say, because maybe if you say it enough it'll be true. His hands on your body made your skin crawl, but at least you're relatively certain he wouldn't leave you to die in the yard. "I mean, I've been lucky so far, right?" You sigh as you rest the microwave on Red's steel counter. "I made it through Doggett and Healy and the SHU."

Silence fills the empty kitchen as you plug in your microwave and fiddle with the knob that's still loose.

"Lucky?" Nicky spits the word like poison.

As you turn to her, you aren't prepared for the dark awe that colors her face. You take a step back from the pliers she points at you.

"Are you shitting me with this? _Lucky_?" She fills in the space you opened. "You think the warden isn't pressing charges because you were born under a full moon and you carry a fucking rabbit's foot?" She eyes you up and down with scorn. "Jesus Christ, College, you _are_ as dumb as you look."

"Nicky, what—?"

But she doesn't need your encouragement. She talks over you, her voice rising as she backs you into the refrigerator door. "Vause called in favors from the fucking cartel to get the DA to look the other way. Vause made sure that bitch-ass church lawyer of Pennsatucky's had his hands full elsewhere. _Vause_."

As she speaks, your heart drops into your stomach like a block of ice. "No," you say, your defiant voice sticking in your throat. Alex would never do something so dangerous, not anymore. But you think of her asking you about the trial. You think of the mysterious phone call and of Leanne saying the lesbian mob saved you. You shake your head. "No."

"There's your good luck charm, Princess. She stepped off the fucking ledge for you. Again."

_No_.

* * *

_Many thanks to everyone who has left comments or feedback. I love hearing your thoughts! :)_


	9. Chapter 9

You don't hear the rest of what Nicky says. The floor tilts as you push past her, back the way you came, but you make it to the hallway without stumbling. You don't see Red come out of the pantry and take the pliers from Nichols, and you don't hear them call to you.

You don't feel your shallow breathing as you take the stairs down to the laundry, two at a time, or the blood that pounds in your ears, or the way your throat constricts.

You feel only one thing: the frantic, petrified anger that turns your veins white hot. It fuels your steps past the bible-thumpers and Leanne, who herds them out of the laundry room like she's meth head Moses. The fury hollows out your vision until all you see is Alex, loading sheets into the wash.

She sees you coming and squints in confusion. You don't stop.

"What the fuck, Alex. What the fuck!" You're vaguely aware that you're shouting, but you don't care. All your feelings from the last ten weeks seem to boil up inside you and spill over, and you shove her backwards against the stack of silver machines. "You called in favors for me? What the fuck were you thinking? What if they kill you? What if—?"

Alex never was slow on the uptake, and her confusion swiftly gives way to displeasure. She snatches your hands from where they push at her shoulders and growls. "What was I supposed to do? Tell me."

"Stayed the fuck out of it," you shriek. You try to tear your wrists from her grip, but you're still weak from eight weeks of near-starvation and more of nightmares. Angry tears streak down your cheeks. "Left me to lie in the bed I made!"

When you finally wrench free of her hands, she grabs you by the upper arms instead. "You could have gone away to max," she hisses, right in your face. "You could have gone away forever."

"At least you'd be alive!" You jerk in her grasp, trying not to think about how the last time you were this hysterical, someone ended up in a coma. "How could you?" you say, failing to conquer the lump in your throat. "How—?"

She shakes you, hard. Her voice cracks as she yells. "Because I fucking love you, you goddamn asshole."

Her words knock the wind from your lungs. You stare at her, unable to inhale, your mouth hanging impotently open. When you finally regain your breath, it's through sobs. "I thought you were out," you say, gasping. "I thought you were safe."

She catches you as your knees buckle. "Hey. Hey," she says, quieter than before. Distantly you recognize it as her Piper voice, though it's been lined with bone-deep weariness. "I am out, kid." She shushes you against your hair. "It was an old favor."

You're crumbling, despite your relief. Crumbling under the weight of the past two and a half months, under the anguish you've corked inside out of respect for her wishes. Under all your decade-old anxieties about loving a woman whose life was not her own. Under all the fears you never shared with her.

Her arms wrap around you, but it's not enough. It could never be fucking enough. You squeeze tighter and tighter until your trembling body is flush against hers, until her fingers dig into your flesh and you think you'll have bruises tomorrow where she holds you.

"Shh," she whispers. You feel wetness at your temple where her face presses against yours. It's not from your own eyes.

You try to do as she says, but there's a river inside you. "Al, I—" you begin, stifling your sobs in her neck. "I—"

You mean to go on. But after weeks of agonizing over what to say to her, you have no words.

"I know." Her voice is croaky and almost inaudible in your ear. She tangles her fingers in your hair. "I know."

You cling to her as if both your lives depend on it. As if you could just hold her close enough, you could shield her from the demons she claims are vanquished.

But as the minutes pass, you become dimly aware of another voice in the laundry room. "Seriously, lesbians, _now_," the voice says. You realize it's Nicky, standing somewhere behind you, and you realize this is not the first time she has spoken.

For a second, you'd forgotten where you were. You'd forgotten you are not free. That after this, Alex won't sprawl out in a California king and let you hold her until you're satisfied she's safe—not even if she wanted to. "Oh God," you mumble. Your tears are startled to a stop as the bars of your cage press in on you all over again.

"You got the wrong sadistic bastard, Chapman," Nicky says. Out of the corner of your eye, you see her glance anxiously over her shoulder. "We gotta go."

She's moving closer. You sense her presence at your back, and your grip on Alex tightens. You're pretty sure you'll go straight-up Screwdriver Piper on Nichols if she tries to tear you away from the arms you've craved for months. Alex must be able to tell, somehow, instinctively, because it's her own hands that gently pry your fingers loose.

As heavy footsteps plod down the hallway, Nicky grasps your elbow. "For fuck's sake," she says, "you're both going to get a shot."

"Thought you were trying to keep me _out_ of trouble, Pipes," Alex says. When you pull back far enough to see her face, she's giving you a damp, crooked smile.

The footsteps get closer, and you remember that COs exist. You remember that work detail is a thing. Out of bounds is a thing.

Numbly, you let Nicky turn you away. You wipe at your cheeks as she yanks you along the row of washers, but you suspect it's futile.

The steps, you learn, belong to Luschek. He stalks into the laundry, scenting for blood, and you nearly collide with him. "What the fucking fuck?" he says. "Is the _Vagina Monologues_ touring? Where are my fucking microwaves?"

Every muscle in your body yearns to scramble backwards, back to Alex. But Nicky pulls you closer until you can smell rotting vodka on the CO's breath.

"Jesus, Luschek, took you long enough," she says, relief in her voice. "Never thought I'd thank the big man to see you, but I guess miracles do happen."

You blink at Nicky, but whatever web she's weaving seems to work. Luschek stops mid-shout, bewildered by her warm welcome. Behind you, you hear Alex start to load the laundry as if nothing happened.

"This fucking brain trust stuck her pinky in the transformer again and started shrieking," Nicky says. She does an unflattering impression of you being electrocuted. "Had to drag her down here so Red wouldn't ring my neck for disturbing her beauty sleep, Jesus Christ. But now she's your problem." Nicky holds your limp arm out to Luschek. "She probably needs to go to the infirm or something. Goldilocks here has been delirious for the past ten minutes."

He looks impatiently at your arm, as if the dual threats of hassle and paperwork are already making him itch to leave. "I have better things to do than babysit, inmate." His eyes travel up to your face, and you guess your appearance pretty much matches Nicky's version of events. "Lucky you," he says, "you can have a shot before you even get to the nurse." He uses his index finger to mime a gun going off on your forehead. "And you," he calls to Nichols as he escapes up the steps, "your ass had better be back on your stool in half an hour or you'll get one, too."

"Aye aye, captain," she calls, saluting Luschek with the bird.

She drags you toward the stairs in his wake. The urge to fly to Alex still remains, but you choke it down. You think of how easy it was for her to go right back to work.

While Nicky strong-arms you out of the laundry room, you sneak a glimpse of her. She smooths the finished sheets under calm fingers, as if she couldn't care less. As if it's any other day at Litchfield.

Except she's putting the folded ones in the dryer, you realize.

And afterwards, she scoops in some soap.


	10. Chapter 10

Nicky delivers you to your bunk with a promise to shiv you if you so much as sneeze in the direction of the laundry room. "Your sorry ass needs too much saving," she says, lifting your feet from the floor to the bed. "And I'm a tits woman."

But it isn't your ass she saved, and you both know it. A lesser friend might have tried to get all three of you off without a shot—and probably would've failed on every count. Nicky knew that wasn't what you wanted. She knew to sacrifice you to save Alex.

You get that she did it for Alex, not for you, but you're grateful anyway.

"Look," she says, her hands shoved awkwardly in her pockets, "I, uh." She glances from side to side, and you wonder if this is what guilty Nicky looks like. "Lorna said some shit to me last night, and I've been a little on edge. I didn't think you'd blow a gasket, you know?"

As she scuffs her shoe on the linoleum, it occurs to you that what Morello did to Nichols all those weeks ago isn't so different from what you did to Alex. You picked Larry, and she picked Christopher. She chose the life she thought she was supposed to have—the abstract fantasy of a fiancé's love over the reality of Nicky's.

All this time, you've assumed Nichols has been brusque and short-tempered with you because she has feelings for Alex that are more than friendly, and you're the monstrous ex who emotionally maimed the object of her affection. But as you watch Nicky's gaze flit to Lorna's bed, you think maybe it isn't really about you at all.

"So," you say, your bleary eyes slipping closed of their own volition. Your voice sounds low and froggy against the pillow. "How much do I have to pay you to keep this quiet?"

"Tell you what, College," Nichols says. You hear her pour a cup of water from your jug and set it on the floor beside the bed. "You keep Vause from drowning me in my split pea soup tonight—on account of me spilling the beans—and we can call it even."

As your brain begins to shut down, you give a _hm_ that stands in for a chuckle. "Deal," you mumble, already half asleep.

It isn't Nicky's joke that makes you smile. It's the idea she proposed, radical and seductive.

The idea that you, Piper Chapman, are still a person who has some influence over who Alex Vause drowns in soup bowls.

* * *

You sleep through lunch. You sleep right through the second half of work, too, and dinner, and you might sleep all through the night if not for the whispering at the door of your cube.

At first you think it's another nightmare—that Alex's voice will soon morph into Larry's, and when you open your eyes you'll find yourself trapped in the SHU of your dreams.

But then you hear Lorna. She's whispering, too, about cornbread and REM sleep and... you? Was that your name she just said?

You try to force your eyelids to open. By the time you succeed, Alex and Morello are gone. The bright fluorescent bulbs in the Suburbs disorient your groggy mind, and it takes several moments for you to estimate that it's sometime after dinner. A handful of inmates chat in the other cubes, but it's no one you know. One has on a radio, you think. You haven't slept this long in weeks, and your body aches. Or maybe that's from all the crying.

You roll over onto your stomach, groaning, and pick up the cup of water Nichols left. You drain it in one continuous gulp. When you put it down, you see it's been joined by a lumpy tinfoil package. Leanne has left you a pile of TNT, probably.

Inside, though, is a still-warm chunk of Red's famous cornbread. You smile ruefully, recognizing the little jab for what it is—a reminder that last time Alex offered you her cornbread, you threw it in the trash.

This time, you wolf it down in three bites. You hover over the edge of the bed as you chew, tuning out years of your mother telling you not to eat while lying down. She stopped, finally, when you were fifteen and you asked her if it was because her liquid lunches hit her faster when she was standing. Back when you and Alex first started traveling, room service in hotel beds had been your second favorite indulgence.

As you roll onto your back, cornbread and water churning in your stomach, you realize this is the only time you've felt more than a bit peckish since that first day back in the dining hall when you figured out recovering from solitary was going to be more complicated than wolfing down some beef tips. You guess crying your heart out is good for the metabolism.

The fear and anger that boiled inside you earlier have cooled to a simmer. As you stare up at the dusty ceiling, an emotional hangover begins to set in. It's just like the kind you used to get after too many pinot grigios at Smith: your head pounds, your mouth is dry, and you can't bear the thought of facing any of the people who witnessed your rager.

Because _fuck_. What can you possibly say to Alex now? _Sorry I almost got you a shot while checking to see you weren't going to get shot_? How can you look her in the eye and call yourself an adult after losing your shit over someone who's barely speaking to you?

And yet, a curious warmth sneaks through you, too. It radiates from where her fingers gripped your skin, into your muscles and your bones and all the way to your squishy insides, where it settles into a fragile, flickering tinder of hope. Because stone-cold drug dealers don't call in favors for just anyone, do they? Not for people they hate, right?

The thoughts turn over and over again in your mind, and soon you're too unsettled to lie still in your bunk.

You go to the phones and call your dad, then Polly. You tell her she's still in the doghouse after the stunt she pulled in the visitation room, and she tells you she loves you and wants you to be happy—_preferably without Supercunt, but I'll take what I can get_. It had slipped your mind that she must have ridden back to the city with Larry, and you know he has a shit poker face. You ask her pointedly about Finn and Pete, and she drops the subject.

Out on the track, you keep pace with Watson during her evening warmup. She narrows her eyes at you, and you wonder if your face is still red and splotchy. You fall behind when she speeds up, but she gives a mostly friendly wave each time she laps you.

You run until the late winter air bites at your cheeks and freezes your fingertips, and you keep running after that. The numbness in your body is a welcome counterpoint to the tumult in your brain. You run as dusk settles over Litchfield, your breath puffing chalky clouds into the air, well past the time when you would normally be in the library with Alex.

You're sure of very little right now, but you are positive she won't come tonight.

She put herself at risk to protect you. Again. You would love to say your feelings on the issue are simple—that there isn't a single, solitary, itty bitty part of you that feels ecstatic instead of distressed. But eight weeks of solitary confinement does not a narcissist cure.

Still, Alex never wanted you to find out that she took such drastic measures on your behalf. She didn't want you to know about the cartel or the strings she pulled, which means this wasn't some grand gesture to show you she still cares. Maybe she felt obligated, or maybe it was just force of habit.

Nicky wasn't wrong when she said your ass needs too much saving. Between your naiveté and your temper, Alex rescued you from doom more than once while on the road. There had been the genteel traveler in the bar in Santiago, the one you thought just wanted to practice his English but who slipped a roofie in your pisco sour when you went to the bathroom. Just before your straw touched your lips, Alex had appeared out of nowhere to knock the glass from your hand and whisk you away. And there was the drug kingpin you'd mouthed off to in Paris, before you understood who he was, for thwarting your dinner plans. You still don't know what Alex did to pacify him. She put you in the first cab she saw and refused to talk about it when she finally got home. Three days later, you left.

_God_, how could you have been so self-absorbed? You push your legs harder, faster, hoping the pain in your calves will mitigate some of the guilt.

You were twenty-three, that's how. And it wasn't as if Alex encouraged you to branch out, or talked to you about her work life. She liked how your world revolved around her—liked having a pliable, well-read trophy. But she never quite let you in all the way. She knew everything about you, each thought and feeling, and you didn't even know what she did all day.

Then again, it's not like you asked.

You could go around and around like this forever, assigning blame here and retracting it there. But no matter how many times you circle your mind—or the muddy track you're running divots in—it all comes down to the same thing. You were both wrong, and you were both wronged.

It isn't until Fischer comes out to lock the gates that you finally stop running from yourself. Even then, she has to shout _Inmate_ three times before you slow.

You walk by the library despite your decision to stay away, rubbing your frozen hands together, but there are no black boots peeking out from behind the far stacks. Either she didn't come, or you're too late.

"Damn, girl," Taystee says, glancing up from the thick law book she's reading. "You look like shit. But somehow..." She cocks her head to the side and frowns. "...Better than before."

You laugh. You _feel_ like shit, too, but somehow better than before. You're pretty sure Alex Vause's hands on a person could cure the deadliest malady—and cause it, too.

In the suburbs, Morello and Boo are teaching Little Boo to shake paws with mixed results. Nicky, watching wistfully at the sidelines, nods at you in greeting. You brace yourself for an onslaught of snide comments and cry-baby jibes from the other inmates, but no one else bothers to notice you. Nicky must have kept your outburst quiet, despite your broken promise about the split pea soup. You're so thankful you almost hug her.

Alex lies in her bed, eyes closed and headphones in. You watch her for a beat, but her wishes couldn't be more clear if there were a neon _Do not disturb_ sign hung over her cube.

You don't have the energy for a shower, so you slip into your sweats and write letters on your bunk to Danny and Finn. The latter you illustrate in Bic pen with the shoddy drawing skills you remember from Visual Literacy 101. It's late by the time you finish adding a beak to a lopsided duck—no, you decide, an innovatively cubist duck—but focusing on your godson keeps you from thinking about a certain other person who may or may not be aware of your presence on the block.

At count, you and Alex stand at the ends of your beds, outside your cubes, until Bennett calls the Suburbs clear. Which is to say you spend forty-six seconds in agony, your shoulder nearly touching hers, wondering whether you should say something or whether she might.

In the end, you both stay silent.

You disappear into your bunk and switch off your lamp, though you have no intention of sleeping. You're spent, physically and emotionally, but the threat of seeing dream-Alex in the SHU keeps your eyes wide open. The involuntary nap you took earlier will have to suffice.

The nightmares didn't find you then, you realize. Maybe your brain was too busy recovering from your actual trauma to invent any of its own.

Lying on your back, you can see the glow of Alex's light above the wall that separates your beds. You wonder what she's reading, if it's still _Sophie's Choice _or something new. She was always a slow reader. Not for lack of skill, but because she savored every turn of phrase like a brush stroke in a Renaissance masterpiece. You used to tease her when she would read to you, your head in her lap—you who were absorbed in plots and themes and racing to the finish line. Now you would give anything to hear her deep, patient drawl caressing the words of a favorite story. Any story, really.

Eventually her lamp switches off, and you lie awake in the pseudo-darkness of your twin prisons—the one you were sentenced to, and the one you've made for yourself. Leanne is fast asleep across the cube. You roll onto your side, then your stomach, then your other side. You watch through the window as the moon gradually sets, leaving a black, cloudless sky in its wake.

With a sigh, you turn onto your back. How long is it until dawn? Two hours? Four? Your thighs ache from your run, and your head still pounds from the laundry room.

To avert your growing drowsiness, you begin to count the tiles in the ceiling above. You're about to break a hundred when you notice what looks like a white feather fluttering down over your bed. You reach out for it, only to discover it isn't a feather at all. It's a narrow slip of paper.

No, not just paper, you realize as you unfold it. A note.

_Just close your fucking eyes, kid _

You give a short, surprised huff of laughter in the silent block. You lie still for a moment, watching the spot above the wall where the note fell from. But there's only empty air. Alex has already vanished.

Sliding your palm beneath your pillow, you turn to face the wall you share. You imagine her on the other side, lying as your mirror image. When you can picture her just exactly right—when you can see the black hair tumbled over her blankets, the rose peeking out from her sleeve, the quirk of her mouth as she tells you goodnight—you shut your eyes.

"Okay," you whisper.

You wonder if she's imagining you, too.

* * *

_Thanks so much to everyone who has been sticking with me, and especially to those have taken the time to leave feedback! :)_

_Claudia - I'm not able to respond to you directly because you weren't logged in when you posted your review, but to answer your question, I am the same endgirl from the _Legend of the Seeker_ fandom. All my LotS stuff is at LJ and AO3, if you or anyone else is interested. Thank you for your incredible comments!_


	11. Chapter 11

You wake up in a terror, confused about where you are and why it's dark and who is making those noises.

Soon you discern that it's you who's gasping. And the other noises, the shushing and the cursing, seem to come from all around.

You sit up halfway, heart pounding, but a hand presses on your upper arm—it's Fahri, it has to be. "Don't touch me," you hiss, jerking away. In your panic, your shoulder slams into the wall.

The pain is what finally yanks you back to reality.

It's not Alex's old boss squatting beside your bed. It's Lorna Morello. You're in your bunk, not the back room of a French nightclub, and it's dark because it's still nighttime.

_Fuck_.

"Shitballs, shut _up_," calls a muffled voice from the far side of the block. Grumbled agreements follow.

You feel the hand on your arm again, and this time you don't jolt away. The touch is stronger than before—but gentler, somehow, more familiar—and all of a sudden you comprehend that Lorna is still holding both her palms up in a bewildered apology. She can't possibly be touching you. You whip your head to the side to find Alex crouched at the head of your bed.

"It's just me," she says softly, pressing you back down to your pillow. She glances at Morello, who takes the cue to tiptoe out.

Your eyes are wide as they dart around the cube, from Alex to your books to the window to Taylor, who glares at you from her bunk. Alex shifts to block Leanne from view.

You're panting, you realize, and your forehead is damp with sweat. "Alex, Fahri, he—"

"Shh." She cuts off your anxious ramble with a whisper. "It was a nightmare, Pipes, that's all."

You had dreamed of that night in Paris, of walking in on the dead mule. Only as you stood in the doorway, it wasn't a waifish Russian girl with a long bob. It was Alex. And it wasn't strangers who stood all around, laughing over her body. It was Fahri, holding a pistol, and the drug lord you'd angered, and all the others. Her clothes were torn, and her blood seeped into the toes of your shoes as you screamed. _She did it for you_, Fahri had said, smiling. _Wasn't it worth it?_

You swallow, fingers clenching in your sheets. "But he—"

"It wasn't real," says Alex firmly.

Alex who is upright, who is breathing—who is very much alive. A strangled sound escapes your lips. You reach out to touch her face, to feel the warmth under her skin that was absent only moments ago. She captures your hand before it finds her cheek, but she keeps your fingers tucked in hers as she brings them back down to your blanket.

While she holds your hand, you study each rise and fall of her chest. After many white-knuckled minutes of watching her, your own breathing finally slows to match.

"Go back to sleep, kid, okay?" The dread must show on your face, because she squeezes your hand and leans closer. "Did you know Fahri kept hamsters?" she whispers. "I went to his house once, and it was just a maze of custom-built hamster palaces."

You give her a tentative grin in spite of yourself. "It was not."

"On my honor." She smirks. "And they all had names. His favorite was Samson."

A laugh bubbles through you both. You have to stifle the sound before you wake the Suburbs all over again.

Too soon, though, the laughter dies away. And when it's gone, you're left feeling even more adrift than before.

Maybe it's the days of accumulated sleep deprivation, or the uncanny stillness in the block—or maybe it's the fact that you've already hit your rock bottom for vulnerability today, so why quit now?—but you roll over onto your side to face her. "Alex," you say. Your voice is small and wounded and so faint you're afraid she won't hear. "Why did you give me up instead of him?"

Her chin dips low to her chest, dark hair falling around her face. You know you've hurt her, and that adds another layer to your pain. A long silence stretches out between you, until you're sure she isn't going to answer. Until you're positive your question has shattered the fragile truce you've built over the last three days.

Fahri hadn't been in the indictment. You'd looked for his name in each statement, each brief, but it wasn't there. You read every report on drug busts you could find online while you waited for your surrender date. He was never mentioned. Alex did protect some people, you'd learned. You just weren't one of them.

"It wasn't an either-or situation," she says at last, her eyes on the floor. "And Fahri was there for me when no one else was."

You nod against your pillow, trying not to let her see how stricken you feel—how crushed—that a felonious colleague had cared for her better than you had.

"But he wouldn't have given a second thought to having me killed in prison for shitting up the ladder instead of down it," she continues. An urgency enters her voice as she looks up at you—a need for you to understand. "He wouldn't have hesitated to put out a hit on you to pay me back, whether you were locked up or not. I was pissed at you, Pipes; I didn't want you _dead_."

Alex had risen so rapidly through the organization while you were together—well above the level Fahri worked at when you first met her. In your anger and hurt after your arrest, you'd forgotten that he had almost certainly been climbing the ranks, too. That despite her considerable power, he probably still had more.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Alex says, her glassy eyes catching the moonlight. "You were supposed to go to trial and get off with some bullshit story about how I'd brainwashed you. If you came here at all it was supposed to be quick and painless. I never meant for..." Her voice trails off, unsteady and distressed.

You flip the hand she still clutches, tangling your fingers together. "I know," you whisper.

And you do. No matter how furious you were when you found out she'd named you, you believe that she didn't want any of this. Pennsatucky. The SHU. Both your hearts broken all over again from scratch.

As Alex clears her throat, you grasp that she really didn't want to be having this conversation, either. She's already withdrawing into herself, blinking the wetness from her eyes, and you wonder how you were the one who got the reputation for running from emotional chaos. The two of you could co-captain the Olympic team.

But you're not ready to let her go yet. You're not prepared for her to sneak back to her bed and pretend none of this ever happened. When she begins to loosen her hand from your fingers, you grip it like a lifeline. "Will you stay?" you say. "I mean, just a little longer?"

_Like how about forever?_ your mind screams. _Does forever work for you?_

She purses her lips as she considers it, leaning out of the cube to check who's in the bubble tonight. If she were really worried about the COs, though, she would have returned to her bunk long ago.

Alex shifts her weight on the balls of her feet, as if to stand. You tell yourself this is just her way of coping, but it still feels like being slugged in the gut when she shakes her hand free from yours.

But she's not standing up, you realize. She's shifting onto her hip, tucking her legs to the side. And once she's settled, her hand comes to rest on your stomach.

Your blanket fell to your waist when you sprang up from your nightmare, so all that separates your skin from hers is a white cotton t-shirt. It's way too much, and not nearly enough.

She used to touch you this way when you were together. Whenever you were sad or scared or angry and there was a horizontal surface nearby, she would pull you into her as her little spoon—one arm curled under your neck, the other hand pressed against your stomach, pinning you to her body. It was comforting. Grounding.

Now, though, her hand makes your muscles jump. It's been so long since she touched you—_really_ touched you—and you pray she can't see your nipples hardening through your shirt, or the way your cheeks flush.

She doesn't tease you, though, or smirk, so maybe your body's traitorous reactions have melted into the darkness. Or maybe she just isn't ready to joke about the fact that _still_—even after all these years and everything that happened at Litchfield, even after a day of emotional turmoil and a night of terror—all it takes is one well-placed caress from her to send you flying off the carnal handle. You're not sure you're ready for it, either.

"Sleep," she says, her thumb stroking the tension from your abs. It's clear she will brook no arguments.

You close your eyes out of obligation, but they suddenly feel too heavy to hold open. As your consciousness slowly fades, you can't help the smile that tugs at your lips.

Because this is the first time, you realize. The first time in eight years you've fallen asleep beside Alex Vause.

* * *

_Sorry for the delay with this one! I meant to edit and post the next chapter last night, but I accidentally left my laptop at work D: Thanks, as always, for your lovely comments! :)_


	12. Chapter 12

In the morning, she's gone. You sit up, an involuntary wave of eight-year-old nausea roiling through your gut.

Because this is exactly what it was like last time you fell asleep with Alex—what it was like almost every day in Cologne, and then in Paris. You would go to bed wrapped up in each other, sweaty and panting, and you'd tell yourself it was going to be different this time. That Alex was there, holding you, and she would keep her promises about working less. When you woke, she'd be gone again. Sometimes she left a note, but usually she just disappeared into strange cities with strange people to do strange things she told you nothing about.

But as you blink awake, the sun streaming onto your blanket, the rational side of your mind catches up. You have things to do now, too. And Alex has no choice about her work anymore. She doesn't have the luxury of telling Caputo to wait, the way she could have with her mules. Besides, you can't have expected her to spend the entire night kneeling on the floor for you.

That was your job, usually, you remember with a smirk, a flash of heat warming your blood as you stand up to stretch—on the evenings Alex felt especially kinky.

When you glance out the window, you know you've overslept. The clock above the bubble confirms it: you can either shower or eat breakfast, but not both. You opt to be clean instead of fed, despite the growling in your belly.

As you stand under the lukewarm spray, you imagine the water washing clean yesterday's tears. You picture it wiping away your visions of Alex on the floor of the club, and drowning Fahri and his laughter. It doesn't work quite as well as you want it to, but it helps.

What you don't let the water rinse away is the feeling of her arms around you in the laundry room, or the words she growled as she shook you, or the sensation of her fingers stroking your stomach in your bed. You still feel pinpricks of warmth along the phantom outlines where she touched you, and you still hear the word _love_ rattling around in your brain.

You hear the words _you goddamn asshole_, too, and the frustration that undercut Alex's confession. That part you wouldn't mind letting the water take.

Nicky meets you by the outside doors for the walk to work. She looks brighter than yesterday, and you wonder if she and Morello had another talk—a better one, maybe. But you know better than to pry. You remember the pliers. And while you know she had no intention of doing anything but waving them around, you'd still prefer not to stare down their pointy end.

As you trudge across the yard together, Nicky covertly transfers an apple from her jacket pocket to yours.

You finger its smooth, squeaky-clean skin, checking to make sure that what you think just happened actually did. "Thanks," you say, hoping you don't sound too shocked. Your mother always said it was rude to be surprised when somebody did something nice for you. The advice stuck with you, though you were never sure if it was her or the Tanqueray talking. Distantly, you wonder if maybe this is one of the reasons people think you're such an entitled brat.

Nichols raises an eyebrow in a decent imitation of her new BFF—only this eyebrow doesn't make your insides turn to liquid. "You crush me, Blondie," she says, holding her hand to her heart. "I thought we knew each other better than that. But apparently you think I'm just some floozy who throws her fruit to every passing tramp."

You frown, unsure whether you should be offended. "Sorry?"

She rolls her eyes at your confusion, pulling open the door to the electrical shop. "That ain't from me. _Kid_."

You hate the sound of Alex's nickname for you on Nicky's lips. Still, you smile like the Cheshire Cat on speed as you follow her inside.

Tonight, you decide. Tonight you'll go back to the library. Just in case.

* * *

After work, Taystee invites you to start a jigsaw puzzle with her and Poussey. The tattered box shows an oil painting of a dog in a wood-paneled, candlelit bar. You inquire if all the pieces are still there, and they look at you like you asked for lobster tail and a microbrew.

"It's a pup in a pub, Mackenzie," Taystee says to Poussey, flipping her hair over her shoulder as you pull up a chair. Today her upper-middle class white girl is British, too.

Poussey extends her pinky as she picks edge pieces from the bottom half of the box. "Delightful, just delightful."

You hunt dutifully for the corners, but you can't stop glancing up at the clock. The dog has one ear and most of its front legs when the hour hand finally tells you it's time.

You try not to leap out of your seat, but Taystee's _Shit, girl_ suggests that your graceful exit leaves something to be desired. You force yourself to walk calmly all the way to the Suburbs, though your legs itch to run. It's still early, anyway, you remind yourself, as you retrieve the copy of _As I Lay Dying_ that Alex gave you from your shelf. She never arrived at the library at precisely the same time, and you're at least thirty minutes before the earliest possibility.

You carry the book under your arm while you walk through the hallways, as if it's any other musty volume you're using to pass the time—one you could take or leave. You think clutching it to your chest, as is your impulse, might be a bit much.

As you approach the library, though, your nerves flare up.

Maybe Alex won't come. Maybe yesterday in the laundry and then in the Suburbs was just a fluke, just a simple kindness for an old friend in a time of need—one you may or may not have deserved. She told you not to come to her with your pain or your anger, after all, and that's exactly what you did.

And yet, _she_ came to _you_ in your cube last night. She didn't have to do that. She could have left you to Morello and not suffered a single shred of guilt about it.

But maybe she was just afraid Leanne would try to murder you, and Lorna would be too little to put up a fight. She did say she didn't want you dead. Maybe that was the only reason she came, and now she'd rather play cards with Nichols or scrub grease from the kitchen floors than spend another night twiddling her thumbs with you in the bookstacks, waiting for you to spaz out on her all over again.

Before you can shit yourself wondering, though, or chicken out and return to the rec room, you make your feet walk through the library door. It's quiet without Taystee and Poussey, but Sister Ingalls side-eyes you as you pass her table. Inexplicably, she gets up to leave, dragging the only other occupant with her.

You watch them go, frowning, wondering what you did. You're so busy watching and wondering that you round the corner to the backmost aisle with your head craned toward the door. You turn forward at the last moment, just in time to keep from tripping over the bookcart.

And there she is.

Alex is already here, waiting for you. She sits in the far corner with her back against the wall, book propped open on her bent knees. _Waiting for you_.

The grin on your face is lopsided and stupid-big, but you don't care. She smiles, too, when she glances up at you—a small, closed-mouth smirk that makes your chest seize. Because it's not her reserved, taciturn lips you're looking at. It's her eyes. As she watches you walk over, their corners crinkle.

"When you didn't show last night I started to think you'd given up on Faulkner," she says.

You slide down the wall beside her and sit cross-legged, resisting the urge to turn cartwheels at the revelation that she'd been here yesterday, after all—and returned again today, even though you'd stood her up to run yourself ragged on the track.

"My verbose alcoholic Southerner?" you say, scoffing. "Hardly."

She slides her glasses off her nose and into her hair. "And what about your ruthless pragmatist drug dealer?" Her words are teasing—sarcastic, even—but you can sense the uncertainty beneath them.

"Never, Alex." Your heart slams against your ribs at her use of the word _your_.

Her mouth quirks up on one side as she turns back to her book. You scoot closer, peering over the edge of the novel as a flimsy pretext to feel her shoulder against yours.

"What are you reading?" you say.

From the amused way she looks you up and down, she sees right through you. "One of the Brontës," she says. Her face is only inches from yours, and it's hard to concentrate on her voice. If you were focused on her eyes before, it's her lips that fixate you now. "Gertrude, I think."

"Oh, right," you say absently, your mind a million miles from the book in her hand. "I love that one."

She grins that cocky fucking grin of hers, and it does not help you gather your thoughts. "The Brontë sisters were Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, Pipes."

"Huh?" you breathe. Your brow furrows, but all you see is her mouth—her perfect, infuriating mouth.

Before she can answer and before you can stop yourself, you kiss her.


	13. Chapter 13

You get four-point-five seconds of angels singing and trumpets playing before it dawns on you what you're doing.

"Holy shit," you say, springing backwards, hand clapping over your mouth. "Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry." Shit shit shit shit _shit_. How could you have slipped like this? How could you have fucked it all up when you were _this_ close to Alex tolerating your presence on a regular basis again?

She watches while you panic—you can see her at the edge of your vision as you stare wide-eyed at the floor, wishing you could melt right into it. You're about to get up and sprint from the library, COs be damned, but she catches your elbow. When you look up, her eyes burn into yours.

"Oh, fuck it," she says.

Her hand tangles in your hair before you can process what's happening. Her lips are back on yours before you can close them, and without a single moment to catch your breath, she has you in her lap. Dimly, you hear two forgotten books clop to the floor. Everything around you is suddenly, irreversibly Alex—her arms, her mouth, her fucking _tongue_, oh God.

If you had more sense, you might be embarrassed by the needy, joyous sounds that come from your throat. But you don't, so you're not. Besides, you can barely hear yourself over her moan, which feels like Christmas coming a hundred times over.

She pulls at your lower lip in exactly the way you love, worrying it with her teeth then soothing the pain away. She's a little rougher now than she used to be, her bites a little harder. But you hit every curveball Alex throws at you, and soon she's shifting your legs to straddle her lap.

Her fingers slip under your waistband, one hand holding your hips in place while the other snakes between your legs.

"Alex—" you begin, but your words die out as she seats her fingers deep inside you. There's no preamble, no romance, but it doesn't matter. You're already dripping. Sometimes you like it better like this, anyway—the delicious intrusion as she stretches you open for her all at once.

But everything is moving so fast. A few days ago she was barely speaking to you, and now—what?

"Alex," you say again, your voice urgent. You don't know whether you're asking her to stop or to give you so much more. Despite your reservations, you struggle against the hand that holds you still, begging her for friction.

"Shh." Her voice breaks as she buries her face in your neck. It occurs to you that maybe she needs this as badly as you do. That maybe she's been waiting just as desperately.

You abandon your concerns about rushing things and lean into her, your arms around her body and your face in her hair. "Please," you say. "Please."

You were never good at saying no to Alex. And it's not as if you want to—not when she's fucking you like you're her own personal messiah and worship is going out of style. She lets go of your hip, finally, and you grind against her hand as she nips at the flesh between your neck and shoulder. You know you're not going to last.

She slips another finger inside you, drawing a stifled cry from your lips. In seconds, you come apart in her lap.

While you struggle to recover, trembling, Alex murmurs muffled words against the skin she was just abusing. You think you hear _God_ and _Pipes_ and _please_.

Your body sags, stealing inches of your height until your face is cradled in her shoulder. You try not to let your jubilant, disbelieving tears wet her skin. From the soothing sounds she makes and the hand that traces shapes on your back, you're not entirely successful.

When she pulls out, after several moments of stillness, it's a loss.

You're still panting, but you reach between your bodies to touch her. She lets you stroke the cotton between her legs once, twice, before she takes your hand and pins it to her chest.

"It's lights out soon," she says, her voice rough with sex.

You're disappointed, but not surprised.

Alex's interest in being fucked had always maintained a direct relationship with her emotional stability. The more unsettled she felt, the more she wanted to throw you on a four-poster and make you scream—but the less she wanted you to return the favor. She'd take you anytime, anywhere, but she kept her own vulnerabilities more closely protected. It's part of why it was such a devastating blow when you saw Nichols sitting in her bunk before the pageant. Because Alex hadn't just fucked Nicky, you could tell. She had let Nicky fuck her.

But you shove thoughts of Nichols from your mind. She has no place here between you, where the layers of uniform fabric are already barrier enough. And besides, it shouldn't come as a shock that hiding in a corner with you—you, the primary source of her anguish over the past five months, never mind before that—is not the height of Alex's mental contentment.

You sit back so you can see her face and judge for yourself whether lights out is really the reason she won't let you touch her, or whether she just doesn't want to let you in again—literally or figuratively. As usual, though, her feelings are cloaked in smoldering eyes and smirking lips. A fresh wave of need pulses low in your groin, but you cling to your flagging determination to make sense of what's happening.

"Al, what are we doing?"

You expect her to brush you off. Or, at best, to waggle her eyebrows, shrug, and tell you she was just horny. Instead, she reaches up and thumbs a half-dried tear from your cheekbone. "I don't know, kid," she says.

"I heart you, still."

You don't mean to say it, but it's too late.

Alex doesn't answer. She just stares at you, eyes guarded, searching for something you can't name.

"Well, fuck me," says an amused voice from behind you. "Blondie's on Vause like she's the last chopper outta 'Nam."

You jump—an actual, honest-to-God jump, like that cat in that YouTube video—and Big Boo laughs. Alex is surprised, too, but she manages to refrain from spasming.

"The good Sister told me I'd find you two here," Boo says, leaning against a shelf. "But I gotta say, I pictured a lot less clothing or a lot more yelling."

Your instinct is to bury your face in Alex and pretend you've disappeared. She'd make some crack to Big Boo about how much she can accomplish while fully clothed, and you would hide, blushing, while Alex told Boo to take a hike. She'd kiss up and down your neck until you shrieked with laughter and need, and then she'd fuck you again until you couldn't walk.

At least, that was how it used to go.

Now, her silence hangs between you like an ever-expanding fog, growing thicker and more opaque with each second of quiet.

Boo says something to Alex about a surprise birthday party for Nicky she's supposed to be helping with, and the two of them chuckle when she mentions Lorna's contribution.

Did Boo hear your confession? Suddenly, her deep belly laugh sounds malevolent. Alex's arms feel stiff, and the bookstacks seem to be closing in on you. It's too much, and you stand on shaky legs.

"Wait," Alex says, exasperated. "Piper—"

But you're already out the door.

* * *

You jog a single lap around the darkening track, but your thighs are too sore from yesterday to keep pace with a three-toed sloth. It doesn't help that each stride jerks your thoughts back to the wetness that still pools between your legs—your body's way of telling your mind to get the fuck over itself and go shove Alex against a wall somewhere.

And _God_, do you want to. But you both need space, and you'd be lying if you said your pride wasn't a little more bruised now than it had been when you got up this morning, when you saw Alex was gone. You just got so caught up in your hope, you forgot that the ball is still in her court. That you're still the one who dragged her into the chapel then turned on her the second a guy with a five-year plan and Chinese takeout on speed dial called your name.

After your failed run, you go to Sophia and pay her two bottles of nail polish for a trim. Your mother is visiting on the weekend, and you'd prefer the whole trading-your-hair-for-food thing didn't come up again.

"You want to talk about it, honey?" Sophia says, as she tips your neck into the sink.

Eyes closed, you shake your head.

When she massages your scalp, all you can think about are Alex's fingers in your hair, tugging you closer.

Afterwards, you consider ducking into a toilet stall for the few minutes left before the last count. But you know you're being ridiculous. You swore you were going to learn to be an adult around Alex, yet here you are—every bit the lanky, petrified seventh grader who hid from Paul Zemykis during social studies.

You'll give her space if she wants it, you decide, and if fucking you in the library was a mistake, you'll find a way to live through that revelation. But you are finished walking on eggshells around Alex Vause.

She's writing a letter in her bunk when you reach the Suburbs. You give her a wave and a cautious smile when she glances up at you, but you don't stop walking to your cube.

You ignore the way the glasses on the tip of her nose make you want to leap into her bed, glasses be damned, and kiss the wary look right off her face.


	14. Chapter 14

You're up before dawn, thanks to another nightmare about Fahri and Alex. This one was quiet, though, it must have been, because there's no one shushing you or kneeling beside your bed when you gasp awake.

But hey, you think, as you rub your eyes and step under the shower, at least you're not dreaming of the SHU anymore. And at least you're up early enough to beat Alex to the bathroom. It's not avoidance, you reason—not when it's just a coincidence of sleep schedules.

You still feel mortified by the way she just _looked_ at you last night when you confessed your heart still belongs to her. Not that you have any right to complain—you know that. You've dangled your love in front of Alex twice, only to snatch it away when it was no longer convenient for you. You can hardly expect her to make it easy for you now, to present herself on a silver platter and risk that you're using her as a binky again.

It's still mostly dark outside when you walk back to the block in your towel. O'Neill gives you a once-over, but you thank your lucky stars it's not Mendez stationed in the hallway today. The only inmates up and about are Suzanne, who's scrubbing the floors, and a new Asian girl you haven't met yet.

Which is why you're so shocked when a hand comes out of nowhere and yanks you into the supply closet by the rec room.

Your heart pounds as you stumble into the darkened space. Is this the moment when Leanne will finally make you pay? The moment when Mendez will teach you who's really in charge? "What the—?"

A light flips on, and it's Alex. She grips you by the upper arms as the door swings shut, her gaze heated with anger and something more primal. She lets go when she sees the remnants of your fear, but she doesn't back down. "I thought you were done running away from me," she says.

Your brows knit together. "I am."

"That's why you disappeared the second things got heavy? Jesus, Piper."

"But—" you start to argue. And yet... she's sort of right, maybe. You've been trying to show her how considerate you can be, how unselfish. You've been trying not to push her. But in a way, you've been just as self-centered as usual. "Okay," you say, nodding slowly. Beads of chilled water drip from your hair to your shoulders, but you ignore them. You shove aside all your usual argument-winning strategies and go for one you haven't tried yet. Honesty. "You're right. I got embarrassed, and I ran. I'm sorry, Alex. I fucked up again."

She looks taken aback, as if she expected you to deny it and had lined up an array of vicious comebacks for just such an occasion. "Are you afraid of me?" she says at last, her voice quiet.

"Yes." You see hurt imprint on her features for the briefest moment before it's hidden away. But you're going to stick with this honesty thing if it kills you. It's all you have left. "I used to be afraid of the things you were involved in. Of what it meant for our future, if we could even have one." You shake your head, as if the simple gesture could dislodge the hold she has on your heart. "And now I'm afraid of how you make me feel."

"Well, when you put it like that," Alex says, her lips twitching up. "You scare me sometimes, too, kid," she whispers.

"We suck," you say with a half-smile, echoing her words from that day in her bunk, the day you screamed at her for turning you in and she called you out for latching onto anything that moved to avoid being alone. "What are we going to do, Al?"

"Right now?" Her eyes roll up to the ceiling to consider it. "I think you should kiss me."

You don't need her to tell you twice. You're in her arms in a heartbeat—less than that—your hands cradling her face as your lips meld. You're heedless of the dingy mop and bucket behind you, or the way your towel loosens and falls to the floor now that you're no longer holding it up. Her tongue slips over your bottom lip and into your mouth, seeking out all the places that always make you sigh.

This isn't like yesterday's kiss, full of need and impatience. There's need, still, yes, and a sense of urgency you never had to worry about on private white-sand beaches where you had all the time in the world. But there's a stillness to this kiss, too—a contentment with being exactly where you are in exactly this moment, together.

When Alex breaks away to catch her breath, you hug her close. She gathers you to her body, squeezing so hard that you start to worry about air. You cling to her just as tightly.

"I love you, too," she says against your wet hair. "Is what I was going to say yesterday before you peaced the fuck out."

You smile over her shoulder, giddy tears burning the corners of your eyes. "I thought you just hearted me," you say.

"Nope." Alex leans back and pushes a dripping tendril behind your ear. "You're stuck with the whole shebang."

"Poor me," you say, but you're pretty sure your grin could power the lights over Yankee Stadium.

She smiles, too—a bemused smirk that makes your insides feel like goo—until she glances down at your towelless body. She takes in the curves and angles, frowning. "I want you to eat more," she says abruptly.

You feel exposed like this, naked as you are under the fluorescent glow. "Way to make a girl feel pretty, Vause."

She blinks at you. "You're beautiful, Piper." You hear the unspoken _Duh_ and feel a little more at ease. "But I'm serious. Especially the way you run." She brushes her fingers over your hipbone, which is still more prominent than it was before Christmas. "You're going to hurt yourself without more padding."

"The way I run?" She never comes out to the track. What does she know about your running?

Alex looks shifty, as if she'd like to take back what she just said, pronto. "I've been known to watch you from the window from time to time," she says, the picture of studied nonchalance.

"Oh yeah?" Your grin returns as you imagine her spying on you from above.

"I guess I wasn't done riding your merry-go-round," she says, sighing.

"My what?"

"Nothing." Alex pulls you close again, pressing her lips to the indent below your ear. "Just something I was wrong about."

You let it go, because her hands feel like magic on your skin. They haven't stopped traveling your body, and soon your grip on her is less hug and more heated embrace.

"I want to feel you," you say, breath hitching as her fingertips skate over the side of your breast.

She reaches between your legs, but you squirm away.

"No, _you_," you say, tugging at the hem of her white long-sleeved shirt. It's been so long since you felt her skin on yours. "Please, Alex."

"We can't, Pipes." She gently loosens your fingers from the fabric and bends to retrieve your towel. "Bell will be making rounds in a few minutes," she says, wrapping the towel around your chest and tucking in the ends. "And you are not going back to the SHU because of me. Ever."

You gape at her with wide, incredulous eyes. "Alex, I got put in the box because of a murderous meth addict, and because I couldn't keep my head on straight when she told me I wasn't worthy of being loved," you say, disbelieving. "You had _nothing_ to do with it."

"She told you_ what_?" Alex's mouth sets in a furious line. She looks as if she's about to march down to Psych to exchange words—or blows—with Pennsatucky, and you immediately regret letting her in on Tiffany's particular brand of crazy. Her eyes dart from side to side, as if she's trying to process this new information and how it fits into the puzzle.

"It doesn't matter," you say. "It's over, and it wasn't even remotely your fault."

"You know it's not true, Piper." Her words spill out as a desperate question instead of the decisive statement you're sure she intends. "What Doggett said."

"I know," you say, biting your lip. You're really, really trying to know.

She runs a hand through her hair, her voice strained. "I should have listened when you came to find me," she says, folding her arms over her chest. "_Fuck_, kid."

"You had no way of knowing I wasn't there to cry to you about Larry. I'm not even sure I knew."

She stiffens at the mention of your ex-fiancé. "Still, I should have—"

"Alex." You hold up one hand in the universal symbol for _Enough_. "We both should have done a lot of things. But it's too late now. All we can do is try not to be such colossal imbeciles to each other in the future."

That brings a slight smile to her lips, as your word choice for insults always seems to. "Are you telling me you got wise down the hill, Chapman?"

You open your mouth to answer, but footsteps pass by outside the closet. You realize it's getting late. Soon the halls will be full of inmates making their way to the showers or to breakfast—and plenty of COs, too.

Alex seems to be thinking the same thing. She steps around you and opens the door, just wide enough to peek out the crack. "It's clear," she says. "You first."

But the longer she stays, the more likely she is to get caught on Bell's rounds. You don't care about arriving separately to breakfast anymore—you've learned there are scarier monsters at Litchfield than Lorna Morello's gossip tree.

When Alex opens the door for you to squeeze out, you catch her wrist and pull her into the hallway with you.

She purses her lips as you walk toward the Suburbs, side by side, but you can see the reluctant gratitude she's trying to hide. You're not twenty-three anymore, and you'll be damned if Alex believes she's the only one who can do the protecting.

"So," she says, musing as if your conversation had never been interrupted. "You think we have a future."

"Uh." You're caught off guard, and your mind races. Isn't that what she meant when she said you were _stuck with the whole shebang_? Had you completely misinterpreted that entire conversation? You feel your ears growing hot. "I mean, I was hoping, that is, if you want—"

She smirks, and you realize she's fucking with you. As you pause outside the block, you try to force your joyous grin into the requisite glower.

Alex just winks. "I want," she says.

* * *

_Thank you so much, everyone, for the great feedback :) It's so nice to hear from you guys!_

_I know a few reviewers have commented on how mysterious Alex is in this story, which I think is both a benefit and a drawback of the second person voice—we get to live vicariously through Piper, but we can only know what she knows. And since she's been too nervous to approach Alex head on, in case she oversteps the invisible line she does not quite know the location of, Alex _is_ pretty mysterious to her right now. For what it's worth, though, I don't think Alex considers _herself_ mysterious at all—I'm betting she would say she's being perfectly rational, if only Piper would just see it her way ;) Of course, neither we nor Piper _can_ see it her way, since we're in Piper's mind instead._

_So... yes. I'm sure there was a point in there somewhere ;) Please excuse my ramble, and thanks again for sticking with me!_


	15. Chapter 15

You arrive to breakfast early. Nearly everyone is still in the showers, including Alex, so you sit at a table alone and bask in the quiet while you sip your coffee. You used to drink it with half-and-half and three sugars, but you've learned it's not so bad without.

Your solitude is interrupted by Big Boo and Morello, who sit down across from you for the first time since December.

"I already told you," Lorna says to Boo, her voice teetering on the edge of a whine. "No hooch. Nicky's a recovering addict."

You try not to react to the casual way they welcome you back into their breakfast club, but a smile tugs at your lips. Big Boo must have let it slip that she found you in Alex's lap last night in the library, which apparently lands you on the list of acceptable tablemates again. God, could Litchfield be any more like high school?

"An addict of _drugs_," says Boo, miming the popping of pills, as if Lorna is a few cards short and needs a visual. "Not _booze_." She tips back an imaginary glass.

"Uh-uh." Morello shakes her head, curls bouncing. "It's a no." Boo sighs and crosses something off on a crumpled piece of lined paper.

While they bicker, Alex sets her tray down next to you. Her shoulder brushes yours as she slips onto her stool, and you grin into your scrambled eggs.

Big Boo lets out a wolf whistle. Lorna laughs. It takes a moment for you to realize that you're the source of their amusement.

"Try not to cream your pants, Chapman," Boo says. "It's just breakfast."

Your face turns two shades darker than Morello's reddest lipstick—you're sure of it. You take a bite of soggy pre-cooked sausage to distract yourself, but it doesn't help.

"She ain't even the worst one," says Lorna, clapping her hands with glee. She points at Alex. "Look at Vause's adorable little love smile."

Alex scowls at them both, aiming her flimsy plastic knife like a weapon. "I am _not_ adorable."

"Adooorable," Morello croons, leaning over the table to pinch at her cheeks.

You laugh out loud at the murderous look on Alex's face, and you know you're not the only one who sees the corners of her mouth turn up, undermining her tough facade. But you play along anyway, because it gives you an excuse to soothingly stroke her thigh. Touching her at will is such a simple luxury, one you had taken for granted so many times over the years. But taking Alex for granted is not a mistake you plan to ever, ever make again.

* * *

In the electrical shop, Nicky has to clamp her hand down on your knee to keep its frenetic bouncing from jostling the VCR she's rewiring.

"Sorry," you say absently, the fourth time she grips your jumpy leg.

"Don't test me today, white girl," says Watson from across the table, pointing at you with a minuscule eyeglasses screwdriver. "I will not hesitate to use this." She's working on the inner casing of the TV remote, and you're pretty sure Taystee has a prison cheesecake waiting for her if she fixes it in time for tonight's _Planet Earth_.

Bending over the fried audio cable Luschek gave you to repair, you tuck your feet in the rungs of your stool to keep them still. But you know it's pointless. If it's not your leg, it'll be your nails tapping on the table, or your hair twirling around your finger, or any one of the quote-unquote _vulgar habits_ your mother accused you of when you were impatient as a child.

In your defense, Luschek has clearly rigged all the clocks in the shop to run three times slower than normal. Or, at least, that's what it feels like, spending a day in here when you could be in Alex's arms.

She walked you to work this morning, since you didn't seem able to unstick yourself from her side. Or maybe, you think with a flush of pleasure, as you clip a loose strand of copper, it's that she couldn't unstick herself from yours. You don't know exactly where the two of you stand—whether the Chapman-Vause pottery studio is back on the table—but you know she loves you, and that's enough for now. It's so much more than you allowed yourself to dream of, even on your darkest days in the SHU.

You wonder if there will ever come a time when you don't count the minutes until you see Alex in a state of tortured agitation. Before, it was because you were petrified you'd fuck up somehow and she would hate you even more than you thought she already did. And now—now it's because all it would take is a few seconds of reckless courage and a sprint across the grounds to feel her body against yours. To hear that voice murmuring in your ear.

But you can't.

At the end of the day, as the other inmates pack up, Luschek tells you to stay behind to organize the tool cage.

You stare at him, appalled, your mouth hanging open. "What? No. I have to—"

Nicky pinches your forearm where Luschek can't see. She twists, hard. "—Organize the man's tools," she says, finishing your sentence for you. "Ain't that right, P?"

You grasp that she's trying to save you from your foot-in-mouth disease, but you're fairly certain she won't shed any tears over the way you flinch. "That's what I was about to say," you agree darkly, trying not to glare at her or throw a screwdriver at Luschek.

"Whatever," he says, rolling his eyes. "Just fucking do it."

It's forty minutes into dinner before you finish re-tagging the fuse pullers, and you know Martinez is going to harass you for showing up late. You'd ask Luschek for some kind of note, but he's spent the last hour reading titty magazines in the corner and grunting. The less you have to acknowledge his existence, the better.

By the time you pull open the doors to the prison, you itch with impatience. The hallway to the dining hall is blessedly empty, but you only get in two jogging strides before Alex darts out at you from a connecting corridor.

She steadies you as you collide with her. "What the hell happened?" She speaks through gritted teeth, tugging you down the hall she came from. "Are you okay?"

"No, no, I'm fine." You try to calm her, despite your bewilderment. She pulls you around another corner, through the back door of the chapel. "I just had to stay late."

"You came flying back from the shop like you'd been lit on fire. Did someone fuck with you? Are you hurt?" She stops on the stage and touches you everywhere she can reach, checking for injuries.

You attempt to slow her frantic hands, to no avail. "No. Seriously, Al—"

"Who did this?" Her voice is low and razor sharp. She's crouching beside you, holding your arm at an odd angle. You realize a bruise is forming where Nichols pinched you.

"It was just Nicky," you say, trying unsuccessfully to pull Alex up from the floor.

"Nicky?" she growls.

"I mean, not like that. She was just saving me from Luschek—"

"_Luschek_?" Her eyes widen.

You wince, cursing your choice of words. "No, that's not—"

"Did he hurt you?" She grasps your wrists, and you can feel her fingers trembling. You don't remember the last time you saw her this emotional. In Paris, maybe.

"No. Alex—"

"Piper, tell me. Did—"

"Alex!" You don't want to shout, but you aren't sure how else to get through to her. "I'm fine." Your voice is firm, and you wrest your hands from her grip so you can hold her face. You force her to look up at you. "He wanted me to reorganize the tools, that's all. I was pissed, and Nicky grabbed me when I started mouthing off. I was racing back here because I missed you." Your gaze skates down to her chin at this final admission, because you're still not sure how much is too much in this delicate new terrain.

As she searches your face for the truth, the panic behind her eyes gradually calms. She stares straight ahead, then, right through your middle. For a moment, you're terrified she's going to shut her feelings out entirely—and you with them. Instead, she releases a long breath and leans forward to press her lips to your stomach.

"I kept thinking about when they dragged you in from the yard," she whispers, resting her head against your abs. "There was so much fucking blood, Pipes. It could have been yours. The snow—. And then you just disappeared." Her voice is raspy, but she stops before it can break.

"I'm here now," you say, dropping to your knees on the wooden stage to envelop her in your arms. From the way she clutches you, you can't tell who is holding whom. "I'm here."

Your memories of what happened after the fight with Pennsatucky are dim and fragmented, splintered by adrenaline and fear. You can't imagine what it would have been like to be on the other side—to see Alex bloodied and hysterical, hauled away by COs who didn't give a shit what happened to her. The SHU might have been preferable, you think, as you pull her closer.

She finds her voice again, but it's heavy with pain. "I wish you weren't." She leans back, pushing a loose strand of hair behind your ear. "I _knew_ turning you in was wrong. I knew it was, and I did it anyway because I was so fucking angry."

"And vindictive," you add helpfully, smiling, to lighten the mood.

Alex's laugh is tight, but it's a laugh all the same. Her shoulders relax some. "And vindictive," she agrees, before her brows crease in seriousness again. "There's no justification for it. Breaking someone's heart isn't an imprisonable offense." She adjusts the tilt of her glasses on her nose and looks you square in the eye. "I'm sorry, Piper."

You glance down at her hands in yours, stroking them with your thumbs. "This is going to sound crazy, but... I'm not, really. I mean, yeah, prison sucks—"

"Thank you, Captain Understatement." She rolls her eyes.

"—But I'm not sorry that I get to know you again."

"Don't say that." Alex shakes her head. "It shouldn't be like this."

"No," you say. "But it is. And if someone was going to get less time for my name, I'm glad it was you."

She swallows, and you can almost feel the lump in her throat. "There isn't a single second that I don't regret handing you that suitcase, kid."

As you take in the wetness behind her glasses, your stomach flips. You've waited so many years to hear her say this. Ever since the airport in Brussels, when she told you so casually that you would have been killed if you'd flaked. Afterwards, you were always sure these words would be the next out of her mouth, if only you held out a little longer. They had to be, right? Because who shoves the person they love in front of a firing squad? If only she admitted it was wrong, you could forgive her. But the apology never came. And then she asked you to fly to Istanbul, and it felt like she was the one holding the gun.

But somehow, now that she's finally, _finally_ telling you what you've yearned to hear, you discover that you don't need it anymore. You realize that the jagged hole inside your heart, the one that was waiting to be filled in by her apologies and remorse... it's already been patched up. By age, you think, and by the hard-won empathy and radical perspective shift that came with losing your freedom, as she had long ago sacrificed hers.

You've already forgiven her.

No matter how cavalierly she brushed off the danger, Alex had _lived_ in front of the firing squad, every minute of every day. You see that now. She protected you nine hundred and ninety-nine times—often, you suspect, with her life. And that last time, that single time, that one in one _thousandth_ time, she made a mistake. Lord knows you made them, too. Some mistakes are just more federally legislated than others.

"It's okay," you say at last. You feel the truth of it deep in your bones. A weight seems to lift from your chest, and you breathe more easily than you have in what feels like forever. You give her a half-smile. "I did some fucked up shit, too, you know."

She scoffs. "Your fucked up shit didn't get us handcuffed."

You had clung to that idea, too, back when you first arrived at Litchfield. Now you know better. "Maybe," you say, shrugging. "Or maybe if I hadn't been such a self-involved viper who abandoned you in your moment of need, you would've retired from the cartel and bought us a seven-bedroom bungalow in Havana." She looks ready to argue, but you put a finger to her lips. "There's no way to know, Al."

She studies you for a long moment, then takes your hand from her mouth and squeezes it. "I would have gone for Argentina," she says, the hint of a smile on her lips. "Better wine." From the forced lightness of her tone, you know she hasn't accepted your forgiveness yet.

But she leans in to kiss you anyway.

Sometimes—every once and again—you don't mind Alex's affinity for smothering her feelings in sex.

* * *

_We're nearing the end! Only three more chapters after this one. I'm flying out of town tonight to be in a wedding this weekend, so I won't be able to post again until Monday at the earliest._

_I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend! May your dreams be full of Alex Vause ;)_


	16. Chapter 16

Alex is swift and demanding as her tongue invades your mouth, the way she always is when she hasn't had you in too long. It's not even twenty-four hours since the library, but you suppose there's a lot of time to make up for. Not that you're complaining, not with the way hot sparks shoot through body at each of her nips and licks.

She eases you backwards until you're lying on the floor behind the altar. You rip off her shirt with all the ferocity of that first time in the chapel—more, maybe. You're frantic to feel every single square of her skin, all the soft curves and lean muscle you missed so desperately in the SHU. You're doing a pretty rockstar job, too, until Alex bats your hands away to get your shirt over your head and your bra unhooked.

But you'll forgive her. Because when she finally blankets you with her body, her naked breasts pressed against yours, you've never felt anything so exquisite. "Oh God," you say, sighing.

Alex grins down at you between kisses. "Keep it together, Chapman. Your pants aren't even off yet."

You blush, because you know her teasing is only for show. She's made you come with your clothes on literally hundreds of time—in the backs of cabs, at restaurants, on planes, at home just to show you she could... the insufferable, irresistible asshole. But that isn't what you want tonight. You want to feel her everywhere, all over you, and you reach down to shove your offending pants away.

"Ah ah," she says, catching your fingers and replacing them with her own. "My job."

As punishment for your haste, she inches the fabric down your hips agonizingly slowly, brushing her lips over each newly exposed swath of skin. She laughs at your frustrated wriggling, refusing to let the urging hands on her shoulders make her move any faster. By the time you're naked, you feel like you might explode before she even touches you.

When she leans in and places a long, soft kiss to the curls above your clit, you almost do. But you hold yourself together, just barely, because you know this kiss comes from a different sort of place. It's tender and chaste—as chaste as Alex Vause could ever be—and you feel it radiate through your center, to the tips of your fingers and toes. It isn't a kiss that says _I'm going to fuck you_, though you know she is. It's a kiss that says _I'm going to love you_.

Tears prick behind your eyes as she kisses your thigh, but you smile. As you run your hands through her hair, you wonder if there will ever come a time when you don't become a pile of mush over this fucking woman.

Probably not.

When Alex slides back up your body, you reach for her waistband. This time you refuse to take any shit about your impatience, and her pants are gone in the blink of an eye. You've waited long enough.

She's on top, though, and letting you up so you can drink in the sight of her naked body does not seem to be a priority for Alex. Her thigh presses between your legs, drawing a groan from your lips. She worries a nipple with her tongue as she moves against your wetness, her skin immediately made slick. Before long, you're panting. You clutch at her shoulders, ready to let go, but she shifts back just far enough to make you crazy. "Not like this," she murmurs, snaking a hand down to trace the outline of your pussy. "You can ride my thigh all you want later. I want to feel you come on my fingers."

"Please," you say, breathless as you strain your hips toward the hand that's taunting you, playing over your flesh in all the places except the ones you need.

Alex smirks, cocky as hell, and raises an eyebrow. "Begging already?" she says, sliding a finger over your slit but not inside. "That's my girl."

You dig your nails into her back in retaliation, but she keeps right on smirking. "Just fucking fuck me," you say, gasping.

And she does. She enters you in a single smooth thrust that makes your mouth fall open and your breath stop short. She pulls out almost all the way, her eyes fluttered shut above you, as if she's memorizing the way you feel—every single inch. Only when you push up into her hand does she start to move, fast and deep.

She sucks at your neck, and your muscles begin to spasm out of control. A third finger slides into you—or is it the fourth? it feels like so fucking much—and she uses her other hand to grip one of your thighs and press it up. She stretches your leg until your knee hooks over her shoulder, until it almost hurts, until you're all the way open to her and completely at the mercy of her fingers. As she puts her weight behind her thrusts, it's all you can do not to scream out to all of Litchfield.

"Come for me, Pipes," Alex says into your ear, her voice hoarse. She brushes her thumb over your clit, then around it in circles until you're mumbling nonsense. "_Now_."

You don't need to be told. You cry out as your body quakes, grasping at her with each wave of pleasure. Alex covers your mouth to stifle your cries, letting your thigh fall. She draws out your orgasm until you jerk with every flick of her thumb.

Finally, mercifully, she stills. The heel of her hand comes to rest against your flesh, her fingers still buried inside you.

As your chest heaves, you kiss the palm that's over your mouth. She drags her hand away while you catch your breath, her fingertips snagging on your lips. She strokes down your throat, along your collarbone, between your breasts. She squeezes one of your nipples, and you realize she isn't done with you yet.

"Alex," you whine, as her fingers begin to move inside you again, slower and deeper than before. You feel like you've taken all you can handle.

But when she leans over and sucks a nipple into her mouth, your needy gasps betray you. Already fresh moisture is pooling between your legs; already your chest is flushing with desire. Before prison, she was almost never satisfied with watching you come just once. And you had almost never _really_ reached your limit, no matter how sated and deliciously sore you felt. With Alex, you aren't even sure you have one.

She makes you come again, then again, and again. True to her word, the last is with her thigh grinding between your legs. Her face hovers right above yours, and you revel in her nearness. You kiss her everywhere you can, from the bottom of her jaw to the sweep of black hair that comes from her temple. She comes, too, this time, groaning into the curve between your shoulder and your neck.

It's beautiful, but it's not anywhere close to enough.

When she pulls back to recover, breath ragged, you see your opportunity. Her hips are straddling yours, so you skid your torso down until your face is settled beneath her pussy. You wrap your arms around her thighs, holding her in place. You wrap your arms around her thighs, holding her in place as you drag your tongue from her ass to her clit.

"Fuck, Piper." Alex's hands tangle in your hair, as if you've taken her by surprise and it's all she can do to hang on.

You hum over her clit in response, delighting in the way it makes her tremble. She's soaking wet, dripping onto your chin, and you remember how she told you to eat more. If this counts, you think you can manage.

Alex moves in short, jerking thrusts as you tease her, staring down at you with hooded eyes. From the way her thighs shake on either side of your head, she's straining to stay upright without a headboard to hold, to keep herself from smothering you.

You snake one hand up to push on her chest, while your other elbow nudges her knee open wider. She loses her balance, just like you hoped she would, and catches herself on her hands as she falls backwards. She's splayed open for you now, unable to lift herself away, her body slanted and her head thrown back. It's all you can do to keep going, to not lie back and just _look_ at her.

But you wouldn't be able to do it, not really. Alex tastes too fucking amazing to resist, and you dip your tongue into her pussy before licking your way up to where she wants you. It's not her absolute favorite, you know—your tongue inside her—but you can't get enough.

Delicately, you lap at her clit. Leisurely at first. You grin into dark curls at each of her frustrated sighs. If she thinks you're going to rush this, she's lost her mind. You reach between her legs to slip one finger inside her, then a second. Tight as she is, they slide in as if they were made to be there. She's so wet.

You tilt your head back, licking your lips, and bask in the sight above you.

You've never felt so lucky, you think. Never as much as in this moment.

"Piper," she says, growling in warning. You shudder at her voice, rubbing your thighs against one another in anticipation of whatever heavenly torture she'll rain down on you next time if you don't give her what she wants.

_Next time!_ your mind cheers, as you smile into her wetness. You have so many next times, now.

But between her scent and her moans, which she's trying futilely to stifle, you can't hold out any longer, either. You dive in, sucking at Alex's clit like you're starved and she's the last meal for miles. Your fingers twist inside her until she cries out, and soon she's grinding against your mouth, biting her lip to keep quiet as she comes.

You could just keep going indefinitely, through a hundred more orgasms and beyond, but Alex climbs off and collapses on her back, panting, between you and the altar. "Jesus, Pipes," she breathes out. You smirk, satisfied with yourself, and she pulls you against her side.

As you curl into her, head on her chest, you listen as her heart calms. Each beat is perfect, you think. And then you laugh at yourself for becoming such a ridiculous sap.

"What?" Alex says, her voice a husky drawl.

"Nothing. I was just thinking I should work late more often."

Her fingers clench against your skin for the briefest second, and you know the reflex was involuntary. "Please don't," she says softly. Her tone is serious, more plaintive than she'd ever admit to in the light of day.

You know she used to worry when you were alone with COs—with unfamiliar inmates, even—and you're guessing the Pennsatucky incident did not allay her fears. "I'll do my best," you promise.

She holds you in comfortable silence, stroking your back, and soon you begin to doze on her shoulder. Surely you couldn't dream about terrible things here. Not when you can hear her heartbeat, strong and steady beneath your ear. You're nearly asleep when your stomach rumbles so loudly it startles you both.

"Sorry," you say, laughing. But you can't imagine leaving Alex's arms for something so mundane as hunger. You'll grab some tacos at dinner in a little while. But wait... no. You were already late before—dinner must be long over by now. You shoot upright. "Shit, what time is it? How has nobody come in here yet?" You reach for the clothes at your side, hers mixed in with yours, but she catches your arms and tugs you back to the floor.

"I took care of it," she says, her hand in your hair as she nestles you into her. "Boo owed me from last night. After I impressed upon her exactly how much she interrupted, she offered to stand lookout when you came in."

You're grateful to Big Boo, and to Alex for making this possible, but larger concerns loom over you. "I thought you were done calling in favors for me," you say, rising up on your elbow so you can see her.

She lifts an eyebrow, feigning ignorance. "I never said that."

You're incredulous. "Alex—"

"This is different," she says, relenting. She squeezes your waist. "It's just Boo."

You sigh, but you lie back down. It does not escape your notice that she _still _hasn't promised not to make any more withdrawals on the cartel's credit for you.

"Al?" you say, after several minutes of quiet.

"Mm," she murmurs. You suspect her eyes are closed.

Your voice is softer than a whisper. The question you need to ask, the one that's been haunting you since that day in the laundry... you can't bear to speak it out loud. "Are you really safe?"

You don't know what you'll do if she says no. You hold your breath while you wait for her to answer, as if your aching lungs could stave off the arrival of the one terrible syllable that will doom you both. Because you're in this for the long haul. Now that you have Alex again, a thousand gun-slinging kingpins couldn't make you loosen your grip. Whatever her answer is, it will chart the course of your life as much as her own.

"I am," she says, pressing her lips to your forehead. "Like I said, it was an old favor. I was calling in what I was already owed, not going into debt."

"You won't have to go back to them after prison?" _Because of me?_ The words remain unsaid, but you know she hears them.

"They won't want me anymore." Alex pulls you close as relief rushes through you. "I'll be all over the fly lists. Tracked by the DEA, the whole thing."

You want to ask her if you'll still be able to travel together after you get out, but you lose your nerve at the last second, drawing slow patterns on her stomach instead. You don't even know how much time she has left. She hasn't talked about the future yet, except to say there can be one. Besides, you'd live with Alex in a cardboard box in North Dakota if you had to. You always would have. It's the reason it stung so badly each time she told you she only worked so much so she could provide you with extravagant homes and first class tickets. You never needed any of it.

When you glance up at her, you find she's studying you. "Where'd you go just now, kid?"

You consider lying. It would be better, sometimes, if you could. But you can't. Not with Alex. "Paris."

She tenses beneath you, but you feel her forcing each muscle to relax, one by one. "Oh," she says, with more weight than such a tiny, insignificant word deserves.

"I was thinking about how we lived in such a beautiful place." You avert your eyes. "But everything that happened there was so ugly."

"I wanted us to have a nice life," she says, her voice stiff. You hear the defensiveness she's trying to stamp down, and you know that no matter how many screaming orgasms she gives you behind the altar, there is still a long road ahead.

"And all I wanted was you," you say, sighing at the unfairness of it all. "There's no excuse for the way I left, Al. But it wasn't because I was bored. Please know that."

"Then why was it?" She tries to sound as if she doesn't care, as if it's just an incidental curiosity, but you know better.

"I was scared," you say, biting your lip. "I was scared you didn't love me anymore the way I still loved you." Alex makes a noise of protest deep in her throat, but you press on. "And I was scared that it was only a matter of time before I gave in and went to Istanbul. And then to the next drop, and the next one. I was scared I would have done anything for you."

She sighs then, too, slow and heavy. "Except stay."

Her words make you feel as if your heart's been cut out, stomped on, and shoved back in upside down. "Except stay," you agree sadly. "I said I was scared, I didn't say I was smart."

Alex rests her cheek on your hair. "Too bad we can't put this conversation in an envelope and mail it to eight years ago."

"Where would be the fun in that?" You smile ruefully, squeezing her side. "Think of all the stories we have to tell now."

She gives a hum of laughter, but it soon fades.

"I don't know, kid," Alex says at last. "I could do without some of them."

"Yeah," you whisper. "Me too."


	17. Chapter 17

Alex kisses you again, slow and sensual and full of feelings she'd like to hide, and you wonder how many times you can have her before the next count. Two? Ten? Your record for the chapel is five, but it's one you're willing to chase.

As her fingers play along your hip, though, the stage door creaks open.

Alex has you flipped over in a second flat, one hand beneath your skull to keep it from cracking against the wooden floor. Her body hovers above yours, blocking you from the doorway. She glares at the intruder.

Not a CO, then. You let out a sigh of relief.

"Sorry, lesbians," Nicky says, her neck craned into the chapel. She has an obligatory hand on her eyes, you see, as you peek over Alex's shoulder, but she's blatantly staring through her spread fingers. "Boo said to tell you she had to take a leak, but I'm filling in."

"Thanks," Alex grunts. "Now get the fuck out."

"All right, all right." Nicky smirks. She winks as she steps back, making a squeezing motion with both her hands. "Nice ass, Vause."

The door slams shut behind her, and Alex rolls off of you. You groan, draping your arm over your eyes.

"She didn't see anything, kid," Alex says.

"You mean nothing she hasn't seen before." You're not sure where the sudden flare of anger comes from, but your voice is bitter.

"Woah," she says. When you move your arm, Alex is leaning up on her elbow, watching you. Her gaze is hard, her voice edged with steel. "You wanna unpack that for me, or is this a guessing game?"

You sit up, leaning for your grey undershirt, and slip it over your head. "I know what you were doing in your bunk that day before the pageant." You hate the way you sound, petty and snappish, but you can't stop thinking about how accessible Nicky must have been while you were locked away in solitary. How _comforting_.

You know you have no right to be angry—that it's not fair to expect fidelity from Alex when you were with Larry all that time. But the knowledge that it was you who drove her into Nicky's arms only makes it hurt worse.

"Hey," she says sharply, grabbing your wrist as you stand to put on your pants.

You shake her off and pull on your underwear. You need to go for a run, anything to clear the images of Nicky fucking Alex from your mind. "It's fine," you say dismissively, your voice tight. "I know I don't get to be jealous. I'm just going to—"

Her eyebrows shoot up. "You're jealous?" You stop in the middle of picking up your pants to gawk at her in angry disbelief.

"Fucking _duh_, Alex," you say. She laughs mirthlessly, and you glare at her like she's sprouted horns and grown a tail. "What?" you demand hotly. "What?"

"That's the first time you've ever admitted it," she says. "All those mules, all those years, and this is the first time." Her lips purse in dark amusement. "Guess you are growing up, Pipes."

You're half a second from shrieking at her, but she sits up and catches your hands, which shake as they tie your waistband.

"Come here." Alex's voice is gruff as she tugs you down to her.

You resist, but she has the advantage of gravity. You tumble into her crossed legs, struggling against her as she traps you in her arms. "Let me go," you mutter, wriggling in her lap.

"No," she says simply. She rests her chin on your shoulder. "That's not a mistake I'm making again."

You're tense, still, in her grip, and you know she's still annoyed. But she keeps on holding you. Until slowly, at last, your fists begin to unclench.

By the time she speaks, many minutes later, you're slumped against her chest. "It was just that one time," Alex says, brushing the hair back from your face. "I was pretty messed up, and Nicky was there. She gets me."

"In ways I don't," you say quietly.

"Yes," she agrees. "Sometimes."

Her words burn. But as you sit in silence in her lap, you let her hand on your face soothe the sting.

Because why shouldn't Alex get to have that with someone? You do. There are things Polly gets about you that no one else does, and things you know about her that Pete couldn't begin to imagine. There are even things you and Nicky know—about growing up with a mother you couldn't ever make proud enough—that Alex will just never understand.

"You didn't sleep with her while I was in the SHU?" You know that's what _just that one time _means, and you hate how unsteady your voice sounds, but you need to hear the words.

"While I was cutting my knuckles on sacks of flour in Red's pantry and forgetting to bathe?" she says wryly. "No, kid. I was a little busy worrying about this one girl. Hot, WASPy, usually has her foot in her mouth. You may have seen her."

You shove at Alex's shoulder, hiding your reluctant smile in her neck. You want to know more about what it was like for her while you were down the hill, but you're not sure your heartstrings can take much more yanking tonight.

Worrying your lower lip between your teeth, you caress a dark wave that tumbles over her shoulder. "Do you think one day we'll just talk about the weather?" you say, weaving her hair through your fingers.

"Hm?" Her voice is low and rumbly, and it makes you shiver.

"Like other people talk about... instead of all the things we've done to each other. Do you think we'll ever just be normal?"

"Jesus, I hope not," Alex says in an offended tone. "But I guess I could handle a little more weather. And movies," she adds. "Normal couples talk about movies, don't they?"

You try not to let the wattage of your grin ignite the chapel when she says _couples_, but it's an uphill battle. "So I hear," you say.

"They're playing _Finding Nemo_ in the common room in ten minutes," she says, glancing up at the clock. She leans back and kisses you. "Wanna share my headphones?"

"I don't know. Will it mean I'm your prison wife?"

Alex laughs. "Definitely."

* * *

In the rec room, your chairs are shoved as close to one another as their off-balance metal legs allow, but it's not close enough. You press your side to Alex's, from shoulder to toe, to ease the separation. Each time Dory speaks on screen, you feel her rumble of laughter as if it were your own.

She made you come once more in the chapel, fingers curled in your underwear, before she let you up long enough to finish getting dressed. You can still feel the wetness between your legs, and she smirks each time you shift your thighs, seeking cool relief.

It isn't easy, though—not with the precarious mountain of snacks in your lap. Alex had disappeared into the Suburbs before the movie while you snagged seats. When she returned, her arms were laden with Cheetos and Fritos and barbecue Lay's. You raised an eyebrow, wary of what she had done to gather so much food so quickly... and all your favorites, too. She only shrugged. "I'm hungry," she'd said nonchalantly, as Yoga Jones pressed play.

Each time you polish off a crinkly bag, Alex opens another and pushes it into your hand. You try to decline pretzel sticks and a miniature jar of Skippy, but she narrows her eyes until you take them. She eats, too, little bits here and there, but you suspect it's only to humor you.

Despite your still-too-skinny limbs, you feel a smidgen guilty sitting here in the common room with such a bounty, while so many others don't have the Commissary funds or the bartering skills to eat this way. A few prisoners eye the feast in your laps resentfully, but Alex stares them down one by one until they turn back to Nemo.

Alex doesn't share any of the sheepish, upper-middle class hang-ups you developed while teething on your silver spoon. Unlike you, she fought tooth and nail her entire life to become a person who could have things. If she buys a nicer beach house or a better plane ticket—or, now, more bags of pretzels—she sleeps easy, knowing she earned them. Illegally, maybe, but with her talents and wit all the same.

You must look ready to hand your entire bag of Ritz Bits to Big Boo, who's pouting at you, because Alex takes it from your hand and leans in to whisper in your ear. "They already had dinner," she says meaningfully, tilting the bag toward you to eat. "Fuck 'em."

"But—"

"I'm charming, kid, but I'm not charming enough to feed the whole prison," she says. "There's only one mouth I'm interested in besides my own."

You can't help but smile at her words, and at the image of Alex sweet-talking Chang for enough Twix bars to satisfy the general population. Despite her modesty, you're pretty sure she could do it. Besides, you suspect that last part was a lie. As much as she enjoys painting herself as the ruthless pragmatist, you know Alex cares more about the people around her than she'd like to admit.

Not that you're sorry the person she cares about _most_ is—somehow, miraculously—you. Not even a little.

"I guess I can live with that," you say. You reach into the bag Alex holds and pop a tiny cheese-product sandwich into your mouth. You give one to Big Boo, too, and smile at Alex's eyeroll.

"Dude, shut _up_," Black Cindy grumbles, snacking on her own bag of crackers in the row ahead. "Do you not see this talking turtle shit up in here?"

You turn back to the movie, resting your head on Alex's shoulder. She leans in and holds out a king-size Reese's. "Dessert," she mouths.

When the credits roll, you're still grinning.

* * *

After the last count, Alex makes sure no one is watching from the bubble, then takes your hand and leads you toward her cube. Nicky is already tucked in, eyes closed and feet tapping to the music in her headphones. You're expecting Alex to hand you a book, maybe, or another candy bar she plans to force-feed you to get your weight up. What you're _not_ expecting is for her to pull you down to her bed with her.

"Wait wait wait," you whisper as the lights switch off overhead, maneuvering out of her grasp with an admonishing look. You stay crouched down low so the COs won't see you over the wall, but you don't get in the bed. "The chapel is one thing, but the middle of the Suburbs? Are you planning on having Big Boo pitch a tent?"

Alex laughs. "You flatter yourself, kid. I am not inviting you to partake in my womanly delights—merely my spoon." She reclines on the bed, folding up her glasses, and pats the spot next to her. "You need to start sleeping more. And we can't have you waking the whole block again, can we?" Beneath her playfulness, you sense real worry.

As much as you long to climb in—both to subdue the nightmares and simply to be close to her—you hesitate. You're terrified of your dreams, it's true, but you're even more terrified of Alex getting into trouble. If you're caught in her bed, you'll both get a shot. You can't let Alex keep taking the heat for all of your issues.

You smile. "I'm fine," you say. "Really. It was just that one night. I'll be fine." You turn to sneak back to your cube next door, but she grabs your hand.

"You're an atrocious liar, Pipes, and you're getting in this bed." She tugs you over, guiding you down onto the blanket, which you're glad to feel has a mattress under it again. "Regnery is on duty. Worst case scenario, he'll take a picture on his phone and send it to his creepy video game friends."

"Gross," you say, protesting, but the warmth of her arms is already melting your resistance. She presses her lips to the back of your head, and you're more of a goner with every passing second. "We could still get in trouble, Al." It's a last-ditch stab at reason. "I don't want you putting yourself at risk for me."

"You'll be doing me a favor," she argues. Her voice quiets, laced with barely-concealed emotion. "You were in the SHU for fifty-six days. Do you have any idea how many times I wished I could know you were safe?" She trembles behind you—just once—then takes a steadying breath. "And now I can. So please, kid. Let me."

You squeeze the arms that hold you, closing your eyes against the pain in her words. There isn't a chance in hell you can get up now. If only for tonight, you're determined to soothe away the memories of the past. "So you're telling me I'll be fulfilling your fantasy," you say, your voice husky and suggestive. You feel a chuckle roll through her chest as she relaxes.

Alex leans in close, her breath hot on your neck. "I have plenty of fantasies for you to fulfill," she murmurs, full of promise. It's the voice she's used to take your breath away hundreds of times, and it's as effective now as it ever was.

"I am gonna _ralph_," Nicky groans from the other side of the cube.

You had forgotten she was there, and you have to stifle the sudden laughter that erupts inside you. Alex laughs, too, and it's as if all the anguish of the past months has been churned up and squashed back out in the shape of schoolgirl giggles.

You remember thinking that watching Boo dance with Morello was the first time you'd _really_ laughed since your life turned upside down.

But you were wrong.

It's now.

"Oh, come on," Alex says to Nicky. "I thought you _wanted_ to be front and center for all our..." She lowers her voice meaningfully. "...Intimate moments."

Nicky rolls her eyes, pulling out her headphones and twining the cord around her fist. "I heard you loud and clear, Vause, not to worry. I already got my knock patterns all planned. When you hear me banging out 'Sexual Healing' on the chapel door, the coast is clear. The _Jaws_ theme song? You got five minutes." She pretends to knock a complicated rhythm on the air above her bunk. "I'd tell you what 'The Final Countdown' means, but it's my hope the work will stand for itself."

"So you're planning to spend a lot of time listening at the door," Alex says. You can hear the smirk in her voice.

"You wish, Vause." Nichols turns over to face the wall. "Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta replay some pornos in my mind to wipe away the images of you two naked. And if you're gonna do the dirty in a bunk," she says, sliding her blanket over her head, "at least do it in Chapman's so I can enjoy the traumatized look on that meth head's face in the morning."

"We'll do what we can," says Alex. But she's already rolling you over to nuzzle into her chest.

_We!_ your mind squeals. You grin against the cotton of her t-shirt. _We! _

Perhaps there is some of the twenty-three-year-old left in you yet.

Alex gathers you close, her face tucked in your hair. You can't imagine how you'll ever be able to fall asleep like this—not when all you want to do is feel her. Maybe you'll just stay awake all night, you think, as your eyes slide shut, and breathe her in.

You can totally do it, you tell yourself, repressing your happy yawn. You definitely can.

It's your last conscious thought.

* * *

_We're almost there! Thanks for all the reviews, follows, and kind words :) There are still a few kinks (…ahem) to work out in the last chapter, so it may take a couple of days for me to get it up._


	18. Chapter 18

Alex wakes you when the sky is still a sea of indigo shadows, before the morning shift change in the bubble can land either of you in trouble. Instead of sending you back to your own cube, though, she gets up, too, trades pajamas for towels, and coaxes you toward the showers.

You woke up once before, in the middle of the night, with Fahri's laughter rattling in your brain. But Alex was there beside you. She was warm and whole, and the last thing you remember before you fell back to sleep is her voice murmuring in your ear. _I've got you, kid_.

Suzanne is polishing the bathroom floors when you arrive, but she takes one look at the two of you and begins to squeeze out her mop. "I see you've been following my advice," she says, pointing to her own eyes, then Alex's. She widens her gaze in the direction of your chest. You know she's referring to your titties—specifically, how nice they are and how often Alex should tell you so.

"I have," Alex says gravely. "Thank you."

With a nod and a sweeping bow, Suzanne wheels her bucket out into the hallway.

"I do love your tits," Alex says, once the bathroom is empty.

You grin, stepping into her personal space. "Yeah?"

"Why do you think I couldn't stay in that bunk any longer?" She cups your breasts through your towel, brushing her thumbs over your nipples as they stiffen against the terrycloth.

"Because you missed my winning personality," you say. "Duh."

Alex shrugs, making an exaggerated _Meh_ sound.

You laugh, shoving her backwards into a freshly scrubbed shower stall. "Asshole," you say, but you kiss her before she can answer, long and hard. There's at least twenty minutes before anyone else will be up and using the bathroom, and you plan to make the most of every single one of them.

Alex untucks the towels from your bodies, tossing them over the stall divider, and reaches behind you to turn the water on. It's freezing for a split second, and you jump together, stifling your laughter and shrieks, until her back smacks wetly against the tiles and you've practically climbed up her torso to escape the stream. As she laughs, you press your lips to hers.

Maybe the shower can be your happy place, still.

While the water warms, you drop your mouth to her neck and your hand to her waist. You tease from her belly button to the dark curls between her legs, sucking at the pulsepoint beneath her ear. When you reach your destination, you find she's already soaked, shower or no shower. You wonder how long she's been awake, appreciating your so-called titties—if she even slept at all after your nightmare.

You'll make it up to her, you decide, as you drag one taunting finger through her wetness and over her clit. Alex sighs, her head lolling back to the wall as you cup her with your hand, then slide your fingers inside.

You've missed this. You've missed it so badly that you just stay still inside her, reveling in her tight warmth and the way her breath hits your neck in hot, impatient bursts.

"_Piper_," she says, from beneath hooded lids, digging her fingernails into your back.

Your make her wait another moment, until her brow creases in need and a demanding moan escapes her lips. You fuck her as she rocks against your palm, water clinging to your eyelashes and running in rivers down your face, between your mouths, slickening your bodies as they grind against one another. She bites your shoulder hard when she comes, and you wonder if it will leave a mark.

You kind of hope so.

When her legs stop shaking, she pulls you in for a kiss so deep it makes you dizzy. You aren't sure you can stay upright, not when she kisses you like that, but she swaps your places so it's you who leans back into the wall. She drops to her knees beneath the shower stream, her eyes holding yours as surely as her fingers grip your thighs. She doesn't let your gaze fall when she nudges your legs apart, or when she leans in and licks a line of fire across your hips, or when she finally, finally, finally dips her head lower.

You cry out as she laps at you, louder than you know is wise, but you can't bring yourself to care. Alex is all you can think about—the way her tongue drives you mad and her stare bores into your soul. It's only when she pushes her fingers inside you that your eyes clench shut. And then you can't think about anything at all.

You lose track of how many times you come, Alex's forearm pinning your hips to the wall and her fingers curled inside you.

She seems to sense when you can't take any more, when you're just a single orgasm from unconsciousness, because at last she stands, holding your quaking body steady as she straightens. Alex kisses both your closed eyes, then rests her forehead against yours.

While you gasp for air, you think of a hundred beautiful things to say to her. A thousand eloquent ways to tell her how much you love her and how much you've missed this. Missed _her_. In your mind, you toy with all the vows you could make and the radiant, resplendent words that would bring them to life.

When you finally open your mouth to speak, though, this is what your sex-muddled brain spews out: "I never meant to pick Larry."

She flinched at his name. You put a hand to your furrowed forehead, as if the motion could block out your blunt, graceless words. Alex deserves an apology sooner rather than later, you know that. But you did not mean to do it like this. You consider making a joke about the unnatural proximity of your foot to your mouth, but this is too important to obscure in self-conscious humor. If you and Alex are going to move forward—if you have any hope for a real future, beyond fucking in shower stalls—you can't cover up the second biggest mistake of your life.

Your final betrayal has been the elephant in the room for days—months, really, if you count the time you spent down the hill—and you are determined to grab this particular emotional chaos by the tusks even if it tramples you to death.

Alex steps back slightly, shrugging, and you grab her wet hands to keep her from fleeing. A chill ripples over your skin at her distance, though the shower water is still warm. "I was never choosing _him_," you rush to say, your heart in your throat. "I was choosing stability. A predictable life."

An impassive mask slides over her face. She looks down at your hands in hers, as if she's planning to pull away.

But she stays still. She listens.

"The last time I went freefalling with you, we ended up in prison. I mean, you started talking about Cambodia and ecstasy and... I just panicked. I always felt so out of control back then. I was terrified of hopping on a runaway train again." You lick your dry lips, desperate for her to understand. "Even as I was doing it, Alex, I knew it was bullshit. Who chooses an easy life over one that's worth living?"

Tears threaten to bubble over inside you, but you shove them down. This apology is supposed to be for Alex, not for you. You will not resort to manipulating her with your sadness.

"I'm so sorry, Al," you whisper, staring at a freckle on her shoulder to keep the bathroom from swimming. When she slips her hands from yours, you risk a panicked glance up at her face.

Alex is watching you with pained, loving eyes. "I know," she says, her voice thick. "I'm sorry too, kid."

"What?" You interrupt, incredulous. "No—"

"Yes," she says firmly, reaching around you to turn off the water. "I didn't mean to make you feel like you had no say in how our life would be." She runs a thumb over your cheek. "If you want to do _yoga_ on the beach with three strangers in drag instead of doing X, Pipes, I'm cool with that. If you want to remodel a bathroom..." She trails off, smirking. "...I'm sure your mother has one you can help her with."

You wrap yourself in your towel, laughing through the remnants of the tears you were holding in. You punch her playfully in the arm.

Alex catches your fist and uses it to tug you against her, arms around your waist. "You're in control now, kid," she says softly, her lips over your neck. "We both are. I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. Look where I got us. If you want to live a different kind of life than we had before, I wanna hear your ideas." She leans away, grimacing, and holds up a stern finger. "No Tevas."

You pull her back into your arms, grinning so hard it hurts. "Deal," you say.

* * *

In the breakfast line, you chat with Sophia and Sister Ingalls as the morning sunlight streams in from high, steel-fenced windows. You mean to eat with them—you really do. But when you reach the end of the counter, Alex is watching you from where she sits with Morello and Yoga Jones. She winks, coffee in one hand, and you take an involuntary step in her direction.

"Go on, girl," Sophia says. She laughs as she nudges you toward Alex with her shoulder. "But you owe me the full report at lunch."

Alex pats the stool next to her as you approach, and today you don't even try to conceal your joy as you slip onto it. You aren't sure how you got here, to this magical place where Alex saves seats for you and tangles your fingers in hers under tables.

You do know that you don't ever plan to leave, not even once you're free from Litchfield and could go anywhere in the world. Especially not then.

Taystee sits down on the other open stool beside you, which elicits low grumblings about tribes from a table of black girls next door. She rolls her eyes and holds up a hand in their direction, as in _talk to the_. "I call dibs on Miss Claudette's blanket," she says, pointing at you with her toast.

You frown, scooping up a spoonful of bland oatmeal. "What? No way."

"Don't even try to tell me you need it now that you moving in with Vause. Girl gonna keep you warm all _night_." She does a humping dance on her stool, complete with stomping feet. Poussey snickers at the adjacent table, leaning over to wiggle her fingers with Taystee's in appreciation.

You think about hiding in your scrambled eggs, but they don't smell particularly fresh. "How did you—?"

"That shit is written _all_ over your face, Taylor Swift." Taystee clears her throat and sings in a nasally, uptight falsetto. "'Today was a fairytale...'"

You bury your face in your hands, groaning.

But it's okay. Because as the table dissolves into cackles around you, Alex's fingertips ghost over the small of your back. And when you peek at her through your fingers, the smile she wears is just for you.

While the others fling Taylor Swift lyrics at each other like missiles, Alex leans toward you between sips of coffee. "I have something of yours to return," she says, reaching into the chest pocket where her prison badge is clipped. From her pocket emerges a photograph. No—_the _photograph. The one of you together on the beach in Bali, looking as blithe and incandescent as if the world and everything in it had been created solely for the purpose of your love. Alex holds it out to you beneath the formica tabletop. "Figure I've held it captive long enough."

You stare at the girls in her hand, blissfully unaware of their futures, and wonder how you were ever that young. How she was ever that invincible. The picture's corners are more worn now than when you slipped it into _The Sound and the Fury_ all those months ago—its creases more prominent. But you suppose that's only fitting. You're more worn now, too, and so is the glib, blue-haired mastermind captured beside you in the camera's lens.

And the love that shines out from the glossy image—the one you thought you'd never see again, except here in the rectangular confines of memories—it's been frayed and jaded, too. But perhaps, you think, as you glance up at Alex—just maybe—it's been worn to a polish.

You touch her wrist, pushing her hand back to her lap. "I already had Cal send me another one," you admit sheepishly. "So that's yours, if you want it." Alex had never been one for sentimental tokens, but the erosion of the once-crisp corners tells a different story.

Her eyes narrow, teasing you, but the pleasure on her face is unmistakable. "You did? When?" She tucks the photo back into her pocket.

"The day after I got out of the SHU. It's one Polly took of us in the city, at that first party we threw." You give her a small smile. "So I guess we've both been harboring secrets in our lockers."

She smirks, raising an eyebrow suggestively. "I've been harboring more than that," she says.

The innuendo in her voice makes your blood rise. "Me too," you manage to say, your breath caught in your throat. You hide your flushing face with a sip of water, which you promptly swallow the wrong way.

Alex laughs as Taystee claps you on the back. "You a'ight there, killer?" Taystee says, eyeing you as you splutter.

"Ya know, breathing is hard when you're so _exhausted_," Morello says with a grin. She crouches close to the table to deliver her gossip, glancing conspiratorially between members of her audience. "_Somebody_ was in the showers before dawn this morning."

Her words bring a fresh round of whooping and catcalls and congratulatory winks.

Nicky sinks onto the seat next to Lorna, and the buzz at the table quiets a notch. You're grateful for the respite, until Nichols spears a potato cube on her tray and gives you a pointed look. "Now, College," she says, gesturing at you with her spork, "I don't have to give you the shotgun speech, do I?"

Alex frowns, but you rest your hand on her leg. "The one where you tell me you'll chase me down with your double-barrel if I get Alex pregnant?" you say to Nicky.

She doesn't smile. "Something like that, yeah."

"No," you say seriously, looking her in the eye. "I'd hunt myself down first."

Nicky holds your gaze for a long moment. You try to call every one of your feelings for Alex to the surface for her perusal. Nichols may never be your favorite inmate, thanks to her taste in Christmas gifts, but she's important to Alex. And every time it's counted, she's been there for you, too. At last, Nicky nods. "In that case," she says to the rest of the table, "I've got a bowl of extra-fine Corn Flakes I'm looking to trade for some non-dairy creamer. Who wants in?"

As she turns to the others, you let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding. Alex seems to have noticed, though, because she leans over to kiss the hair at the back of your neck. She squeezes your thigh beneath the table—three times exactly.

Morello offers Nicky some of the Coffeemate she bought last week, and soon the conversation devolves into who is more of a Commissary ho—Lorna, or the new white girl with a face tattoo of a dolphin.

Their voices fade into the background of your mind as you watch Alex. She's so striking when she talks—so stunning when she laughs—and you can't comprehend how you ever, _ever_ let her go.

You know there is still so much left unsaid. There are still so many hurts unatoned for and plans unmade, and still so many mountains to climb before you're free. But for now, in this moment, you're happy just to look at her.

The rest will come.

You've got time.

* * *

_Well, this is the end! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks so much to everyone who's come along for the ride, and special thanks to those of you who have taken (or are about to take) the time to leave a comment—I can't tell you how much I appreciate it :) Also, my endless gratitude goes to Arbryna and Spiffy for taking a look at this last chapter before I posted it._

_I have to go on a bit of a hiatus from writing fic to focus on writing my thesis for grad school, since all my free time for the past several weeks has been completely absorbed by Alex and Piper. Not that I'm complaining, but I would very much like to graduate at some point ;) I'm hoping to eventually come back to this universe, either in one-shots or a sequel. The former would be added here as new standalone chapters, while the latter would be posted as a separate story. I don't know for sure if I'll be able to make either of those things happen, but if you want them I will try! :)_

_I'll still be around lurking and reading, so don't be a stranger. I feel like I don't have nearly enough OITNB fandom friends, so please feel free to PM, tweet, stalk, etc. ;)_


End file.
